Over the next ten years, she contributes several short stories and poems to The Keepsake and other journals.

1830Mary Shelley’s novel The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck is published.
1831She revises Frankenstein for publication in Bentley’s Standard Novels. In this edition, she includes an introduction that reveals a mature and almost nostalgic attitude toward the novel and its inspiration.
1835Mary Shelley’s semiautobiographical novel Lodore is published. She contributes biographical essays to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia; over the next four years she writes about the lives of historical figures.
1836William Godwin dies at the age of 80.
1837Falkner, Mary Shelley’s final novel, makes little impression on a public smitten with the work of Charles Dickens, and she stops writing novels. Queen Victoria is crowned.
1839Mary publishes Percy Shelley’s Poetical Works in four volumes. She becomes infirm and battles various illnesses for the rest of her life.
1844Rambles in Germany and Italy, a book describing Mary’s travels with her son Percy Florence and his friends, is published.
1851After several strokes, Mary Shelley dies on February 1, at age 53. The remains of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin are re
located to the churchyard at St. Peters, Bournemouth, and the three are buried there side by side.
1910The first film adaptation of Frankenstein, produced by Thomas Edi son, is released.
1931James Whale’s film adaptation of Frankenstein premieres, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, in what is perhaps the best known and most popular of the films made from Shelley’s novel.
1959Mary Shelley’s Mathilde, a novel that deals with father-daughter incest, is published; it was begun in 1819 but was suppressed by William Godwin.
1997A sheep called Dolly, the first successfully cloned mammal, is born.

INTRODUCTION

Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Alone—alone—all—all—alone
Upon the wide, wide sea—
And God will not take pity on
My soul in agony!

WHO IS MEANT TO give voice to these lines, which comprise a late entry in the journal of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (Journals, vol.2 p. 573)? Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had been one of her favorite poems since the poet had recited it in her father’s study, so Shelley may simply have meant to reanimate the seafaring protagonist. These lines also speak for many of her own literary creations, including the main characters in her most popular novel, Frankenstein. Captain Robert Walton knew the poem well, attributing “passionate enthusiasm, for the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets” (p. 18). Coleridge’s mariner experiences the utter desolation of being the last living soul on board his ship, and comes to sense that he is living under a ban that deprives him of human company; Shelley’s mariner, too, mourns his isolated state, and desperately longs for a sympathetic friend. Victor Frankenstein also decries the pain of living his nightmare existence, as his loved ones die off one by one. But it is the monster who most deeply feels the utter misery of an enforced solitary existence. Declaring itself “godless” and “wretched” in the final scene, the creature is the living embodiment of these four bleak lines as it is carried out of human earshot and off the pages of Frankenstein by icy waves.

Even in her journal, Mary Shelley used fiction and foils to explore her innermost feelings. By her mid-twenties, the lonely misery of Coleridge’s mariner was all too familiar to her. Nothing in her life seemed to endure. Her mother had died as a result of giving birth to her; her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide about a month after Mary’s nineteenth birthday (and two months before Percy Shelley’s first wife killed herself) ; four of her five conceptions ended tragically, the last a near-fatal miscarriage; her husband, Percy, was drowned in 1822, six years after their marriage, and their friend Byron died two years later. Later attempts at romance (such as her interest in Aubrey Beauclerk) and even friendship (with Jane Williams, for example) tended to be short-lived, or simply ended disastrously. She outlived every major Romantic writer and attended the funerals of almost every one of her loved ones. As early as age twenty-six, she wrote, “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 542).

Her urgent desire to “enrol myself on the page of fame” (p. 6) was quashed upon the death of Percy, her great love and literary mentor. His loss made her surviving son all the more precious to her, and as their financial problems persisted Mary turned to writing for money rather than literary reputation. Many of Frankenstein’s readers are surprised to discover that Shelley wrote steadily through her life, producing six novels after her first, Frankenstein, two verse plays, two travel works, several biographies, translations, children’s stories, and edited works. In addition, she composed numerous essays, poems, and reviews and more than two dozen short stories. Most of the major writings suffered from unfavorable comparisons to Frankenstein; several of them received negative reviews or were cited as morally corrupt (The Last Man was even banned in some European countries). Most of her work has been long out of print, and until about forty years ago, Mary was not given serious consideration as a writer. She seems to have anticipated the potential uselessness of her literary labors relatively early in her career: “What folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read,” she complained in her journal in 1825.