Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797–1851), author of Frankenstein (1818), often considered the first science fiction novel and source of the universal modern image of science gone awry, was born in London on August 30 and died there on February 1. Her father, William Godwin (1756–1836), to whom Frankenstein is dedicated, was an important liberal reformer now best known for An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793). Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), who died four days after her daughter's birth, was an important early feminist now best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In 1814 young Mary eloped to the European Continent with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), considered one of the greatest Romantic poets. Two years later, having already produced two children and begun Frankenstein, Mary married Percy after the suicide of his first wife. They had four children before Percy drowned, but only Percy Florence survived into adulthood. Mary never remarried, devoting herself to motherhood, writing, and editing her husband's works.
Mary treated science less as a solution to practical problems or an intellectual discipline than as a means to "afford a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield" (Shelley 1969, p. 13) Her consistent philosophical position, expressed in science fictions, historical romances, travel books, and essays, was staunchly democratic, based on her belief that while genius must be encouraged, when the discoveries of genius impinge on others, there must be responsibility to the wider community. Frankenstein's murderous monster represents the escape of untempered genius into the world.
Her novel The Last Man (1826) is the first in English of the subgenre of works that imagine a global catastrophe.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1797–1851. Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which has transcended the Gothic and horror genres and is now recognized as a work of philosophical and psychological resonance. (Source unknown.)
In this case the Percy-like protagonist, Lionel Verney, moves from England to a progressively depopulated Europe, apparently the only human with a natural immunity to a new plague. In this situation science is encouraged to tame rampant Nature. Soon after the deaths begin, a character remarks to Verney that should "this last but twelve months ... earth will become a Paradise. The energies of man were before directed to the destruction of his species: they now aim at its liberation and preservation" (Shelley 1965, p. 159).
Science always raises social and moral problems in Mary Shelley's writing. In her philosophical satire "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" (1826), the fact that someone is brought back from frozen suspended animation to live out a 209 year life span, raises fundamental questions of authenticity. Was he alive while frozen? Is his even one life?
In her fiction Mary Shelley consistently articulates ethical issues related to science and technology that have since become major themes of public discussion. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Queen Mab" (1813), we see the cleft stick implicit in the progress of science: "Power, like a desolating pestilence, / Pollutes whate'er it touches; and [yet] obedience, / Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, / Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, / A mechanized automaton." Mary Shelley contributes to ethical thinking about science and technology by calling on society to consider how the power of scientific genius might be limited by the moral claims of the human community. Mary Shelley asks humans, by pursuing science within a community, to do better than they—and her characters—have.
Bennett, Betty T., and Charles E. Robinson, eds. (1990). The Mary Shelley Reader. New York: Oxford University Press..
Muriel Spark. (1987). Mary Shelley. New York: Dutton.
Shelley, Mary. (1965). The Last Man, ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln: The University Press of Nebraska. Text originally published in 1826.
Shelley, Mary. (1969). Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,. ed. M. K. Joseph. New York: Oxford University Press. M. K. Text originally published in 1818 and 1831.
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