Mary Shelley, Emily W. Sunstein, c. 1989

Much more complete notes at this post.

Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Emily W. Sunstein, c. 1989.

Author says this if the first complete or definitive biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley -- the only stellar English Romantic author for whom there is no complete or definitive biography.

1780 - 1830: the age of Romanticism.

Namesake daughter of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving her birth in 1797; father was philosopher and novelist William Godwin; she was the lover and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley; she literally embodies the English Romantic movement.

Romanticism: among its many definitions or qualities, this one -- an intensity not merely in love and sex but in all the passions; expressiveness, imagination, innovation, risk, exploration, exoticism, glory; ordeal and woe.

What distinguishes Mary Shelley is her love of justice, learning, wisdom, and freedom.

Wrote Frankenstein at the age of 19.

Born during the 8th year of the French Revolution.

"At 16 she ran away to live with 21-y/o Shelley, the unhappily married radical heir to a wealthy baronetcy, who personified the genius and dedication to human betterment she passionately admired all her life. Although she was cast out even by her father, the dynamism of this liaison produced her masterpiece, Frankenstein, which she conceived during one of the most famous house parties in literary history with Shelley and [Lord] Byron on Lake Geneva, and wrote while being battered by a series of calamities. The worse of these was the suicide of Shelley's wife. Albeit reluctantly, the lovers married, but fierce public hostility drove them to Italy. Here their two children died, a trauma from which Mary Shelley never entirely recovered. Nevertheless, Shelley empowered her to live as she wished: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, freedom, and a 'wild, picturesque mode of living ... ' When she was 24, he drowned, leaving her pnniless with with a 2-y/o son.

She lived for another 29 years.

Invalided at the age of 48; died of a brain tumor in 1851; poetic timing, just as Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition, a showcase of technological progress against which she had warned in her most famous book.

Chapter 3 and 4:

• background of the main characters
• ends with Mary eloping with Shelley (married), and Shelley's stepsister, Jane

From the internet:  By July, when Shelley and Mary eloped, Harriet's unhappy, though not impossible, situation seemed clear. With her marriage her father had settled £200 a year on her; Shelley gave her a further £100, which was doubled the next January, after the death of his grandfather. So she was comfortably situated as far as her financial situation was concerned. Yet she was clearly unhappy. For a time she returned to her father's house, but found it overly constraining. At some point she took a lover: anecdote has it that he was an office connected with the military establishment in Chelsea. Sometime in the late summer of 1816 Harriet took lodgings nearby, in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, clearly to shield her family from a pregnancy out of wedlock. In late November or early December, having written a despondent farewell addressed to her father, her sister, and her husband, she walked the short distance from her lodgings to Hyde Park and drowned herself in the Serpentine River. At the time of her death she was just twenty-one years old.

Chapter 7: the house party in Lake Geneva

• the birth of Frankenstein
• June 22, 1816: Byron and Shelley to go sailing
• June 22, 1816: after a nightmare the night before, sits down to write the opening line of Frankenstein, "It was on a dreary night of November..." a beginning, only.
• When Shelley returned on June 30, he was impressed and urged her to go on. 
• falling out of those at Lake Geneva

Chapter: writing and completion of Frankenstein

• officially published, March 11, 1818