Frankenstein mary shelley age

Over two hundred years ago Mary Shelley, at age nineteen, published the gothic novel Frankenstein. It has become a classic of English literature.

She was in a privileged position to craft this rich cultural-historical document because her father William Godwin was a leading enlightenment philosopher, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer English feminist who defended the rights of women, and her husband Percy Shelley was a leading romantic poet.

Thus was this precocious and gifted writer poised to dramatize the clash of two cultures—the Enlightenment that celebrated reason and science and the Romantic age that celebrated passion and art.

She was also energized by a series of personal traumas that fueled her feverish story: ten days after her birth her mother died from puerperal fever, at seventeen she eloped with Percy who abandoned his wife, the following year her premature illegitimate child died shortly after being born and her half-