Artifact 8--Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Her best known novel is The Modern Prometheus. She was born in London, in 1797. She was the second child in her family, her mother is Feminism and her father is Liberalism. Her mother died after her birth.
Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by composing letters, and her favorite occupation as a child was writing stories. Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year. Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer Nongtongpaw, comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library when she was ten and a half. However, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."

Mary Shelley's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On 1 February 1851, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour.