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Revision as of 12:08, 2 September 2001 by Pinkunicorn (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, writer, (1797-1851)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was most famously the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the atheist William Godwin, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 after the suicide of his first wife.
Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein in 1816 when staying at Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least being the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost can also be discerned within the novel.
Mary edited and notated her husband's works after his death in 1822 and also wrote a few more novels, none of which even begin to approach the fame and lasting power of Frankenstein.