The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, Mary
Wollstonecraft
(
1797
–
1851
), only daughter of
W.
Godwin
and
Mary
Wollstonecraft
. Her mother died a few days after her birth. In
1814
she left England with
P.
B.
Shelley
, and married him in
1816
on the death of his wife
Harriet
. Only one of their children, Percy, survived infancy. She returned to England in
1823
, after
Shelley's
death. She is best remembered as the author of
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
(
1818
), but wrote several other works. Valperga (
1823
) is a romance set in 14th-cent. Italy. The Last Man (
1826
), a novel set in the future, describes England as a republic, and the gradual destruction of the human race by plague; its narrator, Lionel Verney, begins life as a shepherd boy and after many wanderings finds himself as the last survivor amidst the ruined grandeurs of Rome in the year
2100
, an interesting variation of the ‘Noble...
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