Mary Shelley Research Paper

"[Frankenstein] is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of. You are now five and twenty. And, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?"

These words, uttered by a proud father for his daughter, seem even more commendable against the background of nineteenth century English society. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797) was the daughter of two of England's foremost intellectual rebels, the political philosopher William Godwin and celebrated feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her unorthodox parents, within an orthodox family structure, assured her a life that had to be beyond ordinary intellectually, and sure enough, Mary Shelley grew up to be one of the most prominent literary figures during the Romantic Era of English Literature. She wrote Frankenstein, her most illustrious work, at the age of twenty in 1818. This was a period when most women were being forced to live life on the outskirts of a highly patriarchal society. Shelley’s father, who raised her practically all by himself after her mother’s passing, however,

It’s after going through these notes that the monster learnt of his creation. He blamed his creator for his rejection by mankind, and decided to take his revenge through Victor’s family. After hearing his story, as well as securing a promise to leave Europe, Victor agrees to make another monster only to go back on his word half way through the process. Another series of deaths follow, and finally after Victor’s wife, Elizabeth’s murder, Victor ventures out to seek his own revenge. It’s in the midst of this journey to hunt down the monster that Walton finds him at the Arctic