My World

                                                             My Birthplace, Somers Town, London

         Why hello there, I am Mary Shelley, and many people know me as the renowned novelist, short- story writer, dramatist, biographer, essayist, and travel writer. I live during the Romantic period in which "a culture in an age of reaction and revolution" occured. Also, that was when Gothic literature appeared  and attracted the "bizzare and unusual". Furthermore, I was born on August 30, 1797 in Somers Town, London from a prominent mother who was a philosopher and feminist named Mary Wollstonecraft, and a father who was a political philosopher named William Godwin. My mother sadly died after the eleventh day of my birth. I had to leave with my older, half-sister, Fanny Imlay, to live with my father, and there he married our neighbor. Around the year 1814, I fell in love with my father’s political follower, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and we eventually got married. Meanwhile, we moved to Geneva to live with some close relations, and Geneva was where I got my idea for my famous publication, Frankenstein. When I was a child, my father would used to take me out occasionally to educational outings, and he was the one to teach me a broad range of subjects. When he found out about my relationship with Percy, he was not quite fond of it, and Percy and I had to leave eventually to go on with our own lives. We had four children but only the last child survived... what sad luck did we have. We were considered exiles along with Lord Byron, and we went to live in Italy. Also, I had to help hide the fact that my step-sister, Claire Claremont, was pregnant and eventually gave birth to the child. My beloved Percy ended up leaving me due to a sudden tragic death.

                                                                    Working on my literature
       
          Later on in my life, I had to survive by writing and help bringing up my lovely son, Percy Florence, and eventually, my attachment with Percy was very close that he came to live with me after going to university. The difficulties I had to go through were tremendous. I would get allowance from my husband’s father, but he did not encourage me in what I was doing with his son’s writings. The bond between me and Percy Shelley’s father was indeed a bit tense. It is obvious that his father never approved of our marriage. Moreover, after that sorrowful death of my husband, Percy Shelley, I ended up looking for some new relationships, but none really turned out well. I just kept writing for the rest of my life. My novels included elements of novelistic genres. Many of them consisted of the topics on gender, politics, Enlightenment, and Romanticism. Others were short stories from real life experiences, travelogues, biographies, and editorial writings from Percy Bysshe’s well-thought out works. The down side was that I was not taken seriously as a writer. Then, in the mid-1840s, several blackmailers appeared to me threatening me of my personal information. This shows how much I had to handle, taking in the fact that I was becoming somewhat ill. Overall, I am a woman who was treated like no other and was not admired until it came to the actual realizations of my astounding writing talents.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
              http://www.shmoop.com/mary-shelley/timeline.html
              Western Civilization- Spielvogel Sixth Edition