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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Shelley's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father who was able to provide her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour with whom Shelley came to have a troubled relationship.In 1814, Shelley began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Shelley was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.

Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga and Perkin Warbeck , the apocalyptic novel The Last Man and her final two novels, Lodore and Falkner . Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia , support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.



Wikipedia  

✵ 30. August 1797 – 1. February 1851   •   Other names ਮੇਰੀ ਸ਼ੈਲੀ
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: 94   quotes 37   likes

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes

“Unhappy man! Do you share my maddness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

“Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley The Last Man

Source: The Last Man

“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Science , Happiness

“I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Love

“As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to "write stories." Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Pleasure , Dreams , Success , Training

“We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Victor Frankenstein, quoted by Robert Walton in "Letter 4"
Frankenstein (1818)

Nature

“So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 3
Frankenstein (1818)

World , Way , Soul

“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…”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Journal entry on the writing of her science-fiction novel The Last Man (14 May 1824)

Feeling

“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster in Ch. 15
Frankenstein (1818)

Question , Personality

“The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Fear , Idea , Reality , Sense

“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster to Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 17
Frankenstein (1818)

Peace , Food , Feeling , Nature

“I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so frequently asked me—"How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Girl , Idea , Question , Thinking

“I busied myself to think of a story, — a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Fear , Business , Nature , Thinking

“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

“Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Light , Success , Clothes

“One thing I will add: if I have ever found kindness, it has not been from Liberals; to disengage myself from them was the first act of my freedom.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Letter to Edward Trelawny (27 January 1837). Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=ED9bAAAAMAAJ&dq=if%20i%20have%20ever%20found%20kindness%2C%20it%20has%20not%20been%20from%20the%20liberals&pg=PA283#v=onepage&q=if%20i%20have%20ever%20found%20kindness,%20it%20has%20not%20been%20from%20the%20liberals&f=false

Freedom

“At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person — all my old friends are gone … & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world….”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Journal (15 May 1824)

Age , World , Thinking , Heart

“I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare — But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me — and in any port I can renew my stock. I form no expectation of alteration for the better; but the monotonous present is intolerable to me. Neither hope nor joy are my pilots — restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day's fulfilment. I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume — I shall read fair augury in the rainbow — menace in the cloud — some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney — the LAST MAN.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley The Last Man

The Last Man (1826)

Books , World , Fear , Hope

“I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster to the blind man in Ch. 15
Frankenstein (1818)

Life , Feeling

“All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Victor Frankenstein of Justine Moritz in Ch. 8
Frankenstein (1818)

Suffering

“I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Robert Walton in "Letter 1"
Frankenstein (1818)

Soul , Feeling , Heart