Frankenstein

Written by Mary Shelley

Narrated by Cyril Taylor-Carr

A POWERFUL FULL-CAST DRAMATIC MARATHON
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
Mary Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet, and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Shelley's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Shelley came to have a troubled relationship.
In 1814, Shelley began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Shelley was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple and her stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author's Republic
• Release date: Sep 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798823415897

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist. Born the daughter of William Godwin, a novelist and anarchist philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a political philosopher and pioneering feminist, Shelley was raised and educated by Godwin following the death of Wollstonecraft shortly after her birth. In 1814, she began her relationship with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she would later marry following the death of his first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the Shelleys, joined by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, physician and writer John William Polidori, and poet Lord Byron, vacationed at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland. They spent the unusually rainy summer writing and sharing stories and poems, and the event is now seen as a landmark moment in Romanticism. During their stay, Shelley composed her novel Frankenstein (1818), a masterpiece of Gothic horror and a defining work of the nineteenth century. Following Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drowning death in 1822, Mary returned to England to raise her son and establish herself as a professional writer. Recognized as one of the core figures of English Romanticism, Shelley is remembered as a woman whose tragic life and determined individualism enabled her to produce essential works of literature which continue to inform, shape, and inspire the horror and science fiction genres to this day.