What Books Did Mary Shelley Write, Apart From 'Frankenstein'?

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What Books Did Mary Shelley Write, Apart From 'Frankenstein'?

2 Answers

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Answer 1

Mary Shelley was a popular novelist, dramatist, essayist, biographer and travel writer from Britain. She was the wife of P.B. Shelley and daughter of William Godwin. She is best known for her novel Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley has a long list of literary contributions. She wrote many short stories, novels, essays and editorials, including:

History of Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (1817)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Mathilda (1819)
Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)
The Last Man (1826)
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)
Lodore (1835)
Falkner (1837)
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)
Contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–39), part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)

Answer 2

Although Frankenstein is the only one of her books still frequently read today, Mary Shelley was quite a prolific writer, and in fact supported herself and her son for long periods with her writing.

Her other novels were:

Matilda (written in 1819 but not published until after her death)
Valperga (1823)
The Last Man (1826)
Perkin Warbeck (1830)
Lodore (1835)

Matilda remained unpublished until after Shelley's death, largely because of its highly controversial subject matter of father-daughter incest. Even after she'd died, Shelley's father William Godwin refused to have it published (perhaps not surprisingly) and it didn't appear until 1959.

Today The Last Man is the most popular of Mary Shelley's novels after Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein, it has a strangely modern theme; the destruction of the human race by a mysterious virus.

In later life, Shelley wrote the she herself felt like "the last man" with her husband and most of her friends dead, so, despite the huge scope of its subject matter, the book also explores her private tragedies.