Mary Shelley
"Mary Shelley is the definitive account of the gifted and tragic author whose escape to France at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley caused great scandal in London and permanently scarred her reputation. The couple traveled, with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont in tow, from France to Italy and Switzerland. In the summer of 1816 they rented a villa near Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva where, on a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, they told ghost stories and tales of horror. From that night emerged the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has become an archetype of societal rejection and has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. His creator was an eighteen-year-old girl." "Tragedy shadowed Mary; she came to lose three of her four children in infancy, and when she was twenty-four, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. After his death she moved back to a bleak and impoverished England with her only remaining child and was reduced to hack writing to make ends meet."--Jacket
Biography
xvi, 655 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780802117021, 9780802139481, 0802117023, 0802139485
46731236
A motherless child. The age of Prometheus 1789-1800 ; A birth and a death 1797-1798 ; Father and daughter 1798-1801 ; A shared life 1801-1807 ; Tensions 1807-1812 ; A glassite household 1812-1814 ; Love and confusion 1814
Freedom. Six weeks in Europe 1814 ; Experiments in living 1814-1815 ; Retreat from London 1815-1816 ; Storms on the lake 1816 ; Distressing events 1816 ; At Albion House 1817-1818
Italy. Joys and losses 1818 ; A mysterious history 1818-1819 ; A loss and a gain 1819-1820 ; In absentia clariae 1820 ; Life on the Lung'arno 1821 ; Don Juan among the ladies 1821-1822 ; At the Villa Magni May-August 1822
A woman of ill repute. Bitter waters 1822-1823 ; Fame, of a kind 1823-1824 ; Literary matters 1824-1829 ; Private matters 1824-1827 ; A curious marriage 1827-1828 ; The hideous progeny 1828-1831 ; Entering society 1830-1834 ; Relinquishing pleasure 1833-1836
Keeper of the shrine. Problems of reputation 1836-1838 ; Reparation and renewal 1838-1840 ; Continental rambles 1840-1844 ; Enter the Italians 1843-1844 ; Blackmail and forgery 1844-1846 ; Anxious times 1845-1848 ; The chosen one 1848-1851
Afterlife. An account of the burial of Shelley's heart ; Some unpublished letters ; Portraits of Mary Shelley
Originally published: London : John Murray, 2000