Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley is an author.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote one of the few novels that escaped literature entirely. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, is read now as an early example of science fiction, and its central image has been so thoroughly absorbed by film, comics and cartoons that most people who know it have never read a page. The book itself is stranger and sadder than its reputation: an epistolary novel, structured as stories nested inside other stories, far more interested in abandonment and responsibility than in horror.
She was the daughter of two of the most formidable radicals in England, the political philosopher William Godwin and the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. She married the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she edited and promoted his work, which is a substantial part of the reason it survived in the form it did.
Her other writing has always lived in Frankenstein's shadow. The Last Man, published in 1826, imagines the end of the human species by plague. She also wrote travel narrative, including the 1817 account of a European journey, and her letters were collected long afterwards. The catalogue carries her inside various Gothic anthologies and omnibus collections too, which is its own peculiar kind of afterlife.
Books (8)
Where to start with Mary Shelley
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus first, obviously, and read it properly rather than assuming you know it, because the film versions kept the laboratory and threw away the argument. The novel is a debate about who owes what to whom, conducted at length by two articulate and self-pitying men, and it is much better company than that description makes it sound.
After that, The Last Man is the real recommendation. It is long, it is bleak, it was out of favour for a very long time, and it reads now like the origin point of an entire genre of last-survivor fiction. History of a six weeks' tour 1817 is the travel writing, worth it for the voice rather than the itinerary, and The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is where the actual person is. The Frankenstein Omnibus and The Nightmare Reader are anthologies, useful for context and for the writers she gets read alongside.