1. Frankenstein

3. Mary Shelley Born August 30, 1797; Died February 1, 1851
Daughter of influential author Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin.

4. Mary Shelley Cont.
Mother died 11 days after her birth. A “Romantic” relationship with her father
1814 she began a relationship with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. They left for France (leaving his pregnant wife behind) and travelled Europe; by their return, Mary was pregnant with his child.
Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter.

5. Leading up to Frankenstein
They married in late 1816 after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
Believed in “free love.” Marriage as a repressive monopoly (an idea taught by her father, although he later retracted the lesson), although she never took a lover other than Percy.
Geneva and Lord Byron

6. BIRTH OF THE MONSTER
In 1816, she, Percy, and her step-sister, Claire, stayed with Lord Byron for a summer (he’d gotten Claire pregnant)
Plagued by days of incessant rain, Byron suggested they each concoct their own, supernatural tale
Mary Shelley produced the idea for Frankenstein

7. “It’s ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!”
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus published in 1818
Suicide of her sister, Fanny Imlay, who was found in the Swansea in with a laudanum bottle
Suicide of Percy’s wife, Harriet, by drowning

8. Relationship with Romanticism
Love/Hate relationship with Romanticism
“Romantic” relationship with her father = one of loneliness and solitude
Relationship with her father echoed in her marriage to Percy Shelley.

9. Relationship with Romanticism
Her works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society.
This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.
July 1822: Death of Percy Shelley. Went out on a boat with friends when a storm hit, his body washed ashore ten days later.

10. Frankenstein the Text
How are Mary Shelley’s views of Romanticism evident through Robert Walton’s letters?
What are the major connections between “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Frankenstein thus far? Frame Narratives.
Important themes to notice: the search for companionship and the destructive power of knowledge