Frankenstein Alive!, Mary Shelley
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Frankenstein Alive!

Author: Mary Shelley

Narrator: Geoffrey Giuliano And The Icon Players

Unabridged: 7 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/08/2021

Categories: Fiction, Classic, Horror


Synopsis

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

Mary Shelley ) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet, and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Shelley's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Shelley came to have a troubled relationship.

In 1814, Shelley began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Shelley was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, the couple and her stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author.

Author Bio

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the ardent feminist and author of A Vindication on the Right of Women, and William Goodwin, the radical-anarchist philosopher and author of Lives of the Necromancers, Mary Goodwin was born into a free-thinking, revolutionary household in London on August 30, 1797. Educated mainly by her intellectual surroundings, she had little formal schooling, and at age sixteen, she eloped with the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelly; they eventually married in 1816.

Mary Shelly's life had many tragic elements: her mother died giving birth to Mary; her half-sister committed suicide; Percy's wife Harriet Shelly drowned herself and her unborn child after he ran off with Mary; William Goodwin disowned Mary and Shelly after the elopement but, heavily in debt, recanted and came to them for money; Mary's first child died soon after its birth; and in 1822 Percy Shelly drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia—Mary was not quite twenty-five then.

Mary did not begin to write seriously until the summer of 1816, when she and Shelly were living in Switzerland, neighbors to Lord Byron. One night following a contest to compose ghost stories, Mary conceived her masterpiece, Frankenstein. After her husband's death, she continued to write, publishing Valperga, The Last Man, Ladore, and Faulkner between 1823 and 1837, in addition to editing Percy's works. In 1838 she began to work on his biography, but due to poor health she completed only a fragment.

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