Letter to unknown recipient
from Mary Shelley, 1835 - SANT/BEQ/4/10/236/B |
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Mary Shelley was born in 1797, the daughter of the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died when Mary was only eleven days old, and political philosopher and journalist William Godwin. In 1814, not yet 17, she eloped to the Continent with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their life together, which was mainly spent living in Europe, was complicated and sometimes challenging and only one of her four children survived infancy.
From an early age she was encouraged to write by her father and went on to produce many different types of writing including journals and letters, travel narratives, short stories, children’s literature, articles, reviews and edited works. However, her most famous piece of work is the gothic novel Frankenstein, which she began In the summer of 1816 during a visit to Lake Geneva with Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron.
She suffered financial problems throughout her life and only became financially comfortable in 1844 when her husband’s father died and left his estate to her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley. She spent the rest of her life with her son and daughter-in-law, dying of a brain tumour in 1850 at the age of 53.
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