Mary Shelley - Proserpine & Midas: Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos

Mary Shelley, nee Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on the 30th August 1797 in Somers Town, London, to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This rich heritage from which she was born was immediately disturbed by her mothers’ death when she was only 10 days old. Her father remarried four years later and despite the family’s’ impoverished circumstances, which led to home schooling by her father, who was in constant debt and with it the attendant financial worries, her education was rich with breath of subject and visits by poets and politicians including Coleridge and Aaron Burr. As a writer Mary is forever remembered with the birth of the modern horror novel with her classic work; Frankenstein. Mary was indeed a great talent and many of her other short stories, poems and plays are not recognised for their worth as they should be. However, her editorship of Shelley’s legacy is held in high esteem. Her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the many complications it caused, is certainly one of the short but great arcs of her life. She met him at 17 and lost him in 1822 when she was 25. Mary Shelley died on 1st February, 1851. She was fifty-three. The attending physician believed her death to be the result of a brain tumour. She leaves behind a legacy of works that are the equal of many. At the time society did not, in the main, approve of women writers despite the undoubted quality of their work. It was a different time. Today we are able to enjoy her works unhindered by the prejudice and moral codes of the times.