Custom «Background Information on Mary Shelley» Essay Paper Sample

Mary Shelley the famous author of Frankenstein was born in 1797 and passed on in 1851. Even before she came into this world, Mary Shelley was definitely destined to become a prominent figure in the world of English literature. This is because both her father and mother were great writers and revolutionaries. As a matter of fact, Mary’s father William Godwin born in 1756 and dies in 1836 was a prominent English novelist, philosophy anarchist, and a journalist. On the other hand, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft who lived between 1759 and 1797 was one of the ancient feminists, and was equally radical. Even though she passed on ten days have delivering her daughter Mary, her great works constantly influenced her daughter Mary Shelley to keep on writing (Veeder 1986, p. 182).

In accordance with Veeder (1986) Mary Shelley grew up in an environment that was intensely surrounded by minds of great intellectuals, and her father tutored and educated her. The Frankenstein’s origin is as exciting and mysterious as the novel. It was during the 1816 summer at the famous Villa Diodati located on Lake Geneva shores, Switzerland. Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelly, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont Mary’s step sister, and her physician Dr. John Polidori spent most of their time here. On June 16^th these five got inspired to try out on supernatural stories after reading Fantasmagoriana, German ghost stories collection (p. 183).

Padori was the first among the five to come up with a story; he started to work on his famous tale The Vampyre. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley did not seem to be in a hurry to start creating her first literature piece. At first, Mary suffered from some sort of writer’s block and had produced nothing so far. At one point, she claimed to have had a kind of vision that eventually gave her the inspiration to write Frankenstein. A number of days later, she finally started writing her own ghost story that eventually became chapter IV of the novel Frankenstein. In 1817, Mary finally completed the novel and the first edition was anonymously published in 1818, with Percy Shelly preface. The name Frankenstein was possibly adopted from a castle near Darmstadt in German town where Mary and her husband passed through on the way from Basel (Veeder 1986, 183).

In relation to Shelley (1869) the novel Frankenstein is a story about a young Swiss student who finds out the top secret about animation of lifeless matter. However, he ends up creating a monster after assembling body parts. The story is encompassed by several ideas but the main one is to bring out the fact that scientist should not try to play the role of god. A scientist by the name Frankenstein gets curious and wants to find out whether it’s possible to reanimate dead flesh (p.5). Apparently, Frankenstein sets up a laboratory to carry out experiments regarding his curiosity. The man spends so many years performing experiments with the aim creating a creature that is far much better than human-angelic. As a matter of fact, Frankenstein steals dead bodies and starts assembling them into a primary human being.

On a different note, he falls in love with a beautiful young woman whom he marries and bears a child with. Surprisingly, the out come is not even within his expectations since he ends up creating a monster. Meanwhile, the monster manages to befriend a blind man who teaches it English and French, hence becomes civilized. Amazingly, the monster goes back to Frankenstein and threatens him to create a mate for it. Frankenstein agrees but eventually he ends up frying the monster’s supposed mate. This makes the monster very angry and takes revenge by killing Frankenstein’s wife and child. Consequently, Frankenstein hunts down the creature to kill it but he ends up dying in the arctic. The monster sadly comes to take away Frankenstein’s body since he was its father as well as an enemy (Shelley 1869, p. 149).