Mary Shelley Research Paper

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London, England on August 30, 1797. She married a man named Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 (Patterson 1). Percy was a poet at the time, and two years after Mary married Percy she wrote her most famous book, Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus (Patterson 1). Based on Shelley’s legacy she was born to be a writer, and it was inevitable that one day she would make a worthy contribution to literature (D’Amato 119). Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a writer and leader of the feminist movement, and William, Shelley’s father, wrote a political treatise in 1793. William wrote about what happened during the French Enlightenment (D’Amato 119).

Mary Shelley’s writing took off in the summer of

Orphans are thought to live life with a sense of loss and despair, and a connection of an orphaned author’s work to the person’s life is evident in the writing (D’Amato 117). Mary Shelley, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, lost her mother at birth, and her father a few years later. Shelley’s mother, and Shelley herself, was said to be an avid dreamer, and Shelley’s mother used her dreams and writings as a way to imitate what she saw (D’Amato 121). Mary Shelley may have seen herself as an heiress to this tradition of writing in this manner (D’Amato

She saw demonstrations by Galvani and Aldini, and how they were able to make the legs and arms dead prisoners (Brown 1). Also, a man named William Lawrence gave Shelley some inspiration for Professor Waldman in Frankenstein. Lawrence was a close friend of Shelley’s, and Lawrence was a lecturer on anatomy (Mellor 7). He was fascinated with how the body moves and functions. Lawrence was a strong advocate of the mechanism of the human body is composed of body tissue (Mellor 7). Waldman was the chemist that sparked Frankenstein’s interest in science, and he gives Victor Frankenstein the idea that science can answer the, “big questions,” such as the origin of life (Mellor 7). Lawrence believed that chemistry is the ultimate science, one that “teaches us the composition of bodies” (Mellor