Happy Birthday, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Born August 30th 1797
At the tender age of 19, Mary wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. I am told the 1818 version is the one to read as opposed to the "sanitized" 1831 version. This was a time when women generally used "By A Lady" instead of their real names when publishing. Mary went on to write other novels, short stories, biographies, and travel books.
Born in 1797, she is the daughter of the early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of AVindication of the Rights of Women, who died from complications of Mary's birth. Mary eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, and married him in 1816, after his wife committed suicide. They had four children, three of whom died in infancy. After Shelley's death, she went on, in 1830, to edit a collection of his poems, among her other writings. She began a biography of her famous husband, but died in 1851, of a brain tumor, before finishing it.
I wonder if she had any idea how famous Frankenstein would become.
Blessings nine!
