Letters Of Mary W Shelley Mostly Unpublished

Excerpt from Letters of Mary W. Shelley: Mostly Unpublished; With Introduction and Notes Mary Shelley first became widely known when as a girl of sixteen she ran away, in the early morning of July 28, 1814, with the now immortal poet, who was then un happily married to Harriet Westbrook;but at that time, aside from being the grandson of an English baronet, he had achieved comparatively little that gave promise of immortality. Four months earlier he had written to a\ friend, I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion which renders me dead to every thing but the unenviable capacity of in dulging the vanity of hope, and a terrible susceptibility to objects of disgust and hatred. I live here like the insect that sports in a transient sunbeam, which the next cloud shall obscure forever. That one hope proved to be Mary, who apparently revived his spirits, for in the inspiring companionship of this talented girl he produced most of the work by which he so greatly enriched the world's literature. Considering the fact that Mary had been obliged to live under the same roof with her father, the nagging, parasitical William Godwin, and a stepmother who was not famed for her tenderheartedness, it is not surprising that she should have run away with somebody, or anybody. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Winner of the Prize for Independent Scholars from the Modern Language AssociationNotable Book of the Year from The New York Times Daughter of pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and radical philosopher William Godwin, lover and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of Frankenstein and creator of the science fiction genre, Mary Shelley has remained a figure both undervalued and enigmatic. In this authoritative, ground-breaking biography, she is finally restored to her rightful stature as one of the major figures in English literary history. Here for the first time is a full account of Mary Shelley's career, significant areas of which have never before been examined: her precocious childhood, her adolescent liaison with the radical poet Shelley, her creation of Frankenstein at the age of nineteen, her tempestuous but brilliant married years with Shelley, and, of particular note, the dramatic second half of her life, after Shelley's death. Emily Sunstein has also discovered previously unknown works written by Mary Shelley and traces the development of her unjustly clouded posthumous reputation.