THE LADY
Rothwell Mary Shelley is in the Public Domain. This is the most familiar portrait of Mary Shelley, painted by Richard Rothwell when she was 42 years old.
Born on August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the daughter of two of the most radical thinkers in England at the end of the eighteenth century: William Godwin, a political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and author of one of the foundational works of feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Raised in a household frequented by many of the major literary, philosophical, and scientific authors of the day, she was heavily influenced by the intellectual ideas of the Romantic movement. At the age of 16 she fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and eloped with him to Europe. It was there, on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, that they spent the summer of 1816 with his close friend, George Gordon, Lord Byron. On a rainy evening in June, as they were spending the evening reading ghost stories, Byron challenged each of them to write a ghost story themselves. Mary responded by writing Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which she completed at the age of 19. She went on to write six more novels, as well as dramas, stories, articles, and travel books, establishing a reputation as a significant author in her own right, not just as the wife of her famous husband. She died of a brain tumor on February 1, 1851, and was buried with her mother and father in Bournemouth.
Percy Byshe Shelley is in the Public Domain
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall is in the Public Domain
To learn more about Mary Shelley, the following books are a good place to start:
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988.
Sampson, Fiona. In Search of Mary Shelley. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Mary Shelley's original manuscript of Frankenstein can be found online in The Shelley-Godwin Archive. A collaboration between the New York Public Library, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Oxford's Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and other libraries and museums, this website brings together the handwritten manuscripts of works by Mary Shelley, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her father, William Godwin. The original drafts of Frankenstein can be viewed as a work, with the text presented in the linear order in which the work was published, or as manuscripts, presented in the order in which the author's handwritten manuscripts were originally produced.