What makes mary shelley unique

Frankenstein shows us that aspiration and progress are indistinguishable from hubris — until something goes wrong, when suddenly we see all too clearly what was reasonable endeavour and what overreaching. By the time she wrote her classic, Mary was aware that the man she had married was an emotional and philosophical overreacher. For all his family wealth, Percy was often in debt. Moreover, for a soi-disant writer, remarkably little of his work had been published; Mary spent a lot of time fair copying it to send to publishers.

But Frankenstein is no memoir. Frankenstein identifies the mismatch between human experience and what we are expected to become as technology and science advance. As well as being emotionally expressive, Frankenstein was informed by contemporary intellectual debate. Amateur speculation could be cutting-edge. Those who were professional gave fashionable public lectures, which encouraged more amateur participation. Think of the widespread reception of that towering 20th-century writer Sylvia Plath — no less a transformative poet than her husband Ted Hughes — as simply expressing her feelings.

Indeed, think today of the US poet Sharon Olds, forced for years to equivocate over whether material in her Pulitzer prize-winning work is autobiographical lest she be similarly dismissed.

The question is not how did Mary write Frankenstein , but why is it so hard to believe that she did? After all, she herself left a portrait of the kind of thinking she enjoyed: the leaping, near-intuitive intellect she gives her Dr Frankenstein. Everything we know about her writing process — and we know a lot, thanks to her journal and letters — tells us it was consciously literary, painstakingly crafted. Even its famous trigger was literary. After they had spent an evening in June reading ghost stories together, Lord Byron set a group of his guests at Villa Diodati, on the banks of Lake Geneva, a writing competition.

Mary completed much of Frankenstein while living in Bath, at a time when Percy was often absent. She had already followed Percy into political exile in Europe, and within a year she would suffer the deaths of both her children. She returned to London and spent the next two decades eking out an allowance for her surviving child that her father-in-law loaned her.

Still, a dogged survivor and a consummate professional, Mary supported herself, and saw her son through Harrow and Oxford, by her writing, the great bulk of which had to be done anonymously.

Through the influence of the ghost story competition and the somber setting of their summer, Mary Shelley was inspired to create her most iconic horror story that would be retold generations later.

Stuck together with nothing to do other than reading poetry and musing ideas with one another in their summer villa, Mary Shelley had a nightmare during one dreary night.

What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. After Frankenstein was published and readers began flocking to read the gothic horror novel centered around a scientist who creates new life through the use of galvanism, people throughout history have considered Mary Shelley to be the creator of science fiction. When Frankenstein was first published, Mary Shelley did not attach her name to the story, and so the novel was considered anonymously written.

Because of this, readers began to wonder if Percy Shelley had actually penned Frankenstein because he wrote the introduction to the story, according to Biography. The Seattle Times reported that Frankenstein was actually republished twice: once in when Mary Shelley was finally attributed as the author of the work, and another time in The most horrific thing of all? It is widely considered the first science fiction novel. Though her best-known and clearly most widely-read book, Shelley also wrote the historical novels Valperga and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck , the apocalyptic novel The Last Man , the possibly-autobiographical novella Mathilda , two more novels, Lodore and Falkner , a small collection of travel writings, a number of short stories, several biographies of notable Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French figures, and more.

First published anonymously in January of , there was early skepticism about whether or not Mary Shelley was the primary author of Frankenstein. Stories about the extent to which Percy collaborated with her on the story vary, from Percy overseeing the majority of the writing to simply acting as an editor after the manuscript was completed.

Following in the footsteps of her feminist mother and her political father, Mary Shelley was considered a political radical throughout her life — and her writings, including Frankenstein , have been analyzed for their feminist and communist themes, as well as anti-Catholic symbolism and resistance against individualistic societies. In a life already marked by death, Shelley suffered one more in , when Percy drowned in a sailing accident, when his boat sank during a storm off the coast of Italy.

Though Percy was cremated, his heart was calcified and unable to be burnt with the rest of his remains.