She died of a brain tumor on February 1, 1851, and was buried with her mother and father in Bournemouth. She went on to write six more novels, as well as dramas, stories, articles, and travel books, establishing a reputation as a significant author in her own right, not just as the wife of her famous husband.

Mary responded by writing Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, which she completed at the age of 19. On a rainy evening in June, as they were spending the evening reading ghost stories, Byron challenged each of them to write a ghost story themselves. It was there, on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, that they spent the summer of 1816 with his close friend, George Gordon, Lord Byron.

At the age of 16 she fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and eloped with him to Europe. Raised in a household frequented by many of the major literary, philosophical, and scientific authors of the day, she was heavily influenced by the intellectual ideas of the Romantic movement. This is the most familiar portrait of Mary Shelley, painted by Richard Rothwell when she was 42 years old.īorn on August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the daughter of two of the most radical thinkers in England at the end of the eighteenth century: William Godwin, a political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and author of one of the foundational works of feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Rothwell Mary Shelley is in the Public Domain.

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