20 Giu Mary Shelley
Data di morte: 1 Febbraio 1851
In: Chester Square, Londra, Regno Unito
Storia:
She Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
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 was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories.
In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married.
They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein.
The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary 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.
The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.