The real-life story of Mary Shelley, and the creation of her immortal monster, is nearly as fantastical as her fiction. Raised by a renowned philosopher father in eighteenth-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is a teenage dreamer determined to make her mark on the world, when she meets the dashing and brilliant poet Percy Shelley. So begins a torrid, bohemian love affair marked by both passion and personal tragedy that will transform Mary...

A free-verse novel about the Gothic novelist Mary Shelley, a teenager whose love story led her to write the literary masterpiece, Frankenstein.

"London, 1814: Mary Godwin and her stepsister Jane Clairmont, both sixteen, possess quick minds bolstered by an unconventional upbringing, and have little regard for the rules that other young ladies follow. Mary, whose mother famously advocated for women's rights, rejects the two paths that seem open to her-that of an assistant in her father's bookshop, or an ordinary wife. Though quieter and more reserved than the boisterous Jane, Mary's imagination...

"In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot air balloon lands not far from the Thames. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. A few years later Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin...

In 1816, a sprawling villa in Switzerland is the setting for a stormy night of horror and madness. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Shelley's fiancée Mary Godwin, her stepsister Claire Clairemont and Byron's friend John Polidori spend a hallucinogenic evening confronting their fears and share the terrifying fantasies that chase them through the castle that night.

This comprehensive and informative new edition collects Shelley's best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary, and idealistic.

A collection of critical essays about the works of the English Romantic writer.