In 1816, a young well-educated in England traveled with her lover in the Swiss Alps. Outside the rainy season remain trapped in their homes, where they entertain themselves by reading ghost stories. At the request of the famous poet Lord Byron, a friend and neighbor, who put his pen to paper, competing to see who could write the best ghost story. The young woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, won after a scary story not only made enough to take its place along the old German story that she and her companions were playing downhill, but also to become a best-seller in its time and a still resonates with readers almost two centuries later.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born August 30, 1797 in London, the great literary stock. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of a claim of women’s rights, a feminist tract encouraging women to think and act for themselves. Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary and left her daughter in the care of her husband, William Godwin, a member of a group of radical thinkers in England were Thomas Paine and William Blake among its ranks. Education of Mary in this rarefied atmosphere exposed her at an early age to revolutionary ideas, and has forged relationships useful for her to such notables as Lord Byron.
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Other genres that Mary met as a teenager was Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet young and attractive. Sparks, and in 1814 ran away together for a tour in France, Switzerland and Germany Marie-escape from his family and wife of Percy. Initially happy, their relationship soon under pressure. Relationship with Mary Percy fluctuated with the requirements of his wife, Harriet, meanwhile, took care of Mary with another man. Despite these distractions, the relationship lasted and finally formalized in scandalous circumstances: Harriet, pregnant with Percy drowned in London in November 1816, Mary and Percy married weeks later.
Union between Mary and Percy was not only romantic but also literary. Percy Annotated Frankenstein and Mary is commonly supposed to have written the preface under his name. Frankenstein published January 1, 1818 and became an immediate bestseller. Unfortunately for Mary, this success was only positive in the midst of a series of tragedies. From 1815 to 1819, died three of his four young children, in 1822, Percy drowned off the coast of Tuscany, leaving a widow and single mother of Mary. Mary turned to her husband’s poetry and prose, editing and publishing his poems in 1824 and his posthumous works of poetry and Letters in 1839. She spent the rest of his time on his own writing, editing Valperga in 1823, The Last Man in 1826, the fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Lodore in 1835 and 1837 Falkner. A serious illness plagued Mary, and she died in London in February 1851.