The Maryauthor Shelley Mary Shelley (b. Aug. 30, 1797, London d. Feb. 1, 1851, London) was the only daughter of well-known parents: William Godwin (17561836) a philosopher, political theorist, novelist and publisher who introduced her to eminent intellectuals and encouraged her youthful efforts as a writer and of Mary Wollstonecraft (17591797), a writer and early feminist thinker. Ten days after Mary s birth, her mother died. Two years later her father married Mrs Jane Clairmont. She and one of her daughters, Jane Claire, were to be the cause of Mary Shelley s sufferings and troubles for many years of her life. Godwin s house was visited by some of the most famous writers of the day; one of these was Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The poet was immediately attracted by the beautiful young intellectual, Mary Godwin. In July 1814 the couple eloped1 to France. Mary, Shelley and Jane Claire travelled through France and Switzerland but financial problems obliged them to come back to England. In February 1815, Mary gave birth to a baby girl who died a few days later. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley s first wife had committed suicide. Later Shelley rented2 a house on the banks of Lake Geneva near Villa Diodati, lived in by Byron (1788-1824) himself. It was at Villa Diodati that the talks leading3 to the writing of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) took place. In the introduction to her best known work, Mary Shelley gives her own account4 of Frankenstein s origin. It seems that a number of things, like the reading of ghost stories, theories about the reanimation of corpses or the creation of life, her anxiety about her role as a mother, and the memories of her sense of guilt and loss5 at the death of her own mother came together at that point in her life, creating the waking dream or nightmare that so terrified her. Mary Shelley wrote several other novels, such as Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), but The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is still ranked as her best novel. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks Tour (1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816. After her husband s death in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicising Shelley s writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. She died at the age of 53. 1. elope: fuggire insieme (di due innamorati). 2. rent: affittare. 3. lead: condurre, portare. 4. account: resoconto. 5. loss: perdita.