Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, n�e Godwin 1797-1851
English writer

She was born in London, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1814 she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and married him as his second wife in 1816. They lived abroad throughout their married life. Her first and most impressive novel was Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), her second Valperga (1823). After her husband's death in 1822 she returned from Italy to England with their son in 1823. Her husband's father, in granting her an allowance, insisted on the suppression of the volume of Shelley's Posthumous Poems edited by her. The Last Man (1826) is a futuristic noble-savage romance of the ruin of human society by pestilence. In Lodore (1835) the story is told of Shelley's alienation from his first wife. Her last novel, Falkner, appeared in 1837. Of her occasional pieces of verse the most remarkable is 'The Choice'. Her Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour (partly by Shelley) tells of their excursion to Switzerland in 1814, and Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) describes tours of 1840-43. Her Tales were published in 1890, and two mythological dramas, Proserpine and Midas, in 1922.

Bibliography: E Bigland, Mary Shelley (1959)