Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851), only daughter of W. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. 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 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, finds himself as the last survivor amidst the ruined grandeurs of Rome in the year 2100, an interesting variation on the ‘Noble Savage’ motif (see primitivism). The same motif is seen in Lodore (1835). She wrote other novels, biographies, and short stories, most of which were published in The Keepsake; some have science fiction elements, others are Gothic or historical, and many are continental in setting. Her Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844) was well received. She also edited her husband's poems (1830) and his essays, letters, etc. (1840).