Proserpine and Midas by Mary Shelley

Proserpine and Midas by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, n e Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on the 30th August 1797 in Somers Town, London, to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This rich heritage from which she was born was immediately disturbed by her mothers' death when she was only 10 days old. Her father remarried four years later and despite the family's' impoverished circumstances, which led to home schooling by her father, who was in constant debt and with it the attendant financial worries, her education was rich with breath of subject and visits by poets and politicians including Coleridge and Aaron Burr. As a writer Mary is forever remembered with the birth of the modern horror novel with her classic work; Frankenstein. Mary was indeed a great talent and many of her other short stories, poems and plays are not recognised for their worth as they should be. However, her editorship of Shelley's legacy is held in high esteem. Her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the many complications it caused, is certainly one of the short but great arcs of her life. She met him at 17 and lost him in 1822 when she was 25. Mary Shelley died on 1st February, 1851. She was fifty-three. The attending physician believed her death to be the result of a brain tumour. She leaves behind a legacy of works that are the equal of many. At the time society did not, in the main, approve of women writers despite the undoubted quality of their work. It was a different time. Today we are able to enjoy her works unhindered by the prejudice and moral codes of the times.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist. Born the daughter of William Godwin, a novelist and anarchist philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a political philosopher and pioneering feminist, Shelley was raised and educated by Godwin following the death of Wollstonecraft shortly after her birth. In 1814, she began her relationship with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she would later marry following the death of his first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the Shelleys, joined by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, physician and writer John William Polidori, and poet Lord Byron, vacationed at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland. They spent the unusually rainy summer writing and sharing stories and poems, and the event is now seen as a landmark moment in Romanticism. During their stay, Shelley composed her novel Frankenstein (1818), a masterpiece of Gothic horror and a defining work of the nineteenth century. Following Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drowning death in 1822, Mary returned to England to raise her son and establish herself as a professional writer. Recognized as one of the core figures of English Romanticism, Shelley is remembered as a woman whose tragic life and determined individualism enabled her to produce essential works of literature which continue to inform, shape, and inspire the horror and science fiction genres to this day. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet. During his time at Oxford, he began his literary career in earnest, publishing Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) In 1811, he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he lived an itinerant lifestyle while pursuing affairs with other women. Through the poet Robert Southey, he fell under the influence of political philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary soon fell in love with the precocious young poet. In the summer of 1814, Shelley eloped to France with Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, travelling to Holland, Germany, and Switzerland before returning to England in the fall. In 1816, Percy and Mary accepted an invitation to join Claremont and Lord Byron in Europe, spending a summer in Switzerland at a house on Lake Geneva. In 1818, following several years of unhappy life in England, the Shelleys—now married—moved to Italy, where Percy worked on The Masque of Anarchy (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821), now considered some of his most important works. In July of 1822, Shelley set sail on the Don Juan and was lost in a storm only hours later. His death at the age of 29 was met with despair and contempt throughout England and Europe, and he is now considered a leading poet and radical thinker of the Romantic era.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9781513282701
ISBN 10	1513282700
Titel	Proserpine and Midas
Autor	Mary Shelley
Serie	Mint Editions
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Graphic Arts Books
Erscheinungsjahr	2021-07-08
Seitenanzahl	74
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar