Frankenstein (NHB Modern Plays) (ePub)

Mary Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Her father was the philosopher and novelist William Godwin. Her mother, the early women's rights campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days after the birth.Godwin remarried and ensured his daughter had a good education, inviting literary figures to the housesuch as Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, in 1812, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Already married, the poet's libertarian attitudes allowed his eyes to wander, and two years later he and sixteen-year-old Mary eloped, embarking on a European tour. William Godwin, himself a permissive man, nevertheless disapproved of this relationship. Mary gave birth prematurely to a daughter in February 1815. The baby died after two weeks and Mary wrote in her journal that she had dreamt 'my little baby came to life again; it had only been cold; we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived'. A son, William Shelley, was born the following year and lived to the age of three.



Returning to London, the couple had an 'open' relationship, each conducting affairs. Two further children were born. After Shelley's wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine in November 1816, he and Mary married on December 30th.



In 1816, during a very wet summer holiday beside Lake Geneva, Lord Byron suggested to Shelley, Mary and a friend, George Gordon, that each attempt to write a ghost story. Mary, aged seventeen, started on Frankenstein. It was not finished until the summer of 1817, and was published anonymously in January 1818, to popular but mixed critical success.



Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, Italy, in summer of 1822, and Mary returned to London with her only surviving child, Percy Florence. She did not remarry, but wrote the novels Matilda (1819), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). None was as successful as Frankenstein. She died in Chester Square, London, on 1 February 1851.

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