Who was Mary Shelley?
Writer. Date and Place of Birth: 30th August 1797, 29 The Polygon, Somers Town, London, England. Family Background: The daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the women’s reformer Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother died after complications with her birth on 10th September 1797. Education: Local day school’s in London and Miss Pertiman’s boarding School, Ramsgate. Chronology/Biography of Mary Shelley: 1799: Samuel Taylor Coleridge comes to stay with her father and she hears a recital of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for the first time. 1801: Her father remarries to Mrs. Mary Jane Clairemont. 1803: Anthony Carlisle visits her father and recounts experiments which had been done to the bodies of executed prisoners at Newgate. Electricity had been passed through the corpses to make them move. Also present were Humphrey Davy, Charles Lamb and S.T. Coleridge. 1806: Hides under the sofa to listen to Coleridge reciting “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. 1807: Leaves the Polygon (and it
Name two of her works.” The fame of British author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) rests entirely upon her single novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Indeed, Frankenstein is possibly the first full-fledged science fiction novel, and Mary Shelley the real “father” of the genre. Thanks to endless Hollywood movie adaptations–which, albeit untrue to the book, are much more entertaining–Frankenstein has become a cultural icon. Actually, Shelley did write other works, including more SF. Her 1826 novel The Last Man, set in the late 21st century, describes the downfall of mankind through war and plague. Some of her short stories are tales of the fantastic, and a couple qualify as science fiction. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London to philosopher William Godwin and author/feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. At the age of 16, she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Europe; they married after his first wife’s suicide in 1816. Through her husband, Mary met Lor
” with its phenomenal attention to the periphery, to what is left out, the historical invisibility of women’s work. This art of elision can bring about stunning combinations of terms (“dangerous parasol”) and wonderfully stretched slant rhymes (“…jumped me / …country”). Her poems coax subtle tonal shadings from even a commonplace term like “friend”; she wrote poems to “My Friend Tree” and “To my Small Electric Pump,” but the word is also charged with sexual innuendo and restraint. At times Niedecker’s art seems to rest on the delicate hinge of a single line break which can overlay syntactical logic with other meanings, as in “Wintergreen Ridge,” when the end of one grammatical clause abuts the beginning of another to synthesize both lines within a single metaphor: “let’s say of Art / We climb.” And there are often surprisingly weighted reversals—say, the quick inversion of looking and being looked at: “you are lovely / you have seen”; or the wry aside that “future studies will thro
