BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS VIRGO: MARY GODWIN SHELLEY

Writer. Born August 30, 1797 in London, England. The daughter of famed anarchist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, and married him two years later. Best known for her horror novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), she wrote several others, including Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), the autobiographical Lodore (1835) and Mathilde, which was published posthumously in the 1950s.

Though her marriage to Shelley was riddled with adultery and heartache, including the death of two of their children, Mary worked tirelessly to promote her husbandÕs poetry after his early death in 1822. In addition to editing Shelley's poems and other works, Mary wrote and published several travel books and journals. Mary Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851 at age 53.  

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