2. Mary Shelley was born in England. She was a novelist, short story
writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer and travel writer, best known
for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. 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 was the philosopher and feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her
efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for her novel Frankenstein
, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film
adaptations. On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age
of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour.

3. Mary Shelley employed the techniques of many different novelistic
genres, most vividly the Godwinian novel, Walter Scott's new
historical novel, and the Gothic novel . The Godwinian novel, made
popular during the 1790s with works such as Godwin's Caleb
Williams , "employed a Rousseauvian confessional form to explore
the contradictory relations between the self and society", and
Frankenstein exhibits many of the same themes and literary devices
as Godwin's novel. Shelley uses the historical novel to comment on
gender relations; for example, Valperga is a feminist version of
Scott's masculinist genre. Introducing women into the story who
are not part of the historical record, Shelley uses their narratives to
question established theological and political institutions.

4. Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn
to write by composing letters, and her favourite occupation as a child
was writing stories. Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost
when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving
manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year. Her first
published work is often thought to have been Mounseer
Nongtongpaw , comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library
when she was ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to
another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her
works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's
writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should
prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page
of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."