Lecture The 19th century literature. Romanticism

Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein

Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Percy’s wife, is remembered as the author of Frankenstein (1818). Mary met the famous young poet Percy Shelley when she was only sixteen, and they went to Europe together. In 1816 they met the exciting poet Lord Byron. They stayed at his villa in Switzerland to write. They all wrote frightening, supernatural tales which created the literary vampire genre.

Mary’s story was Frankenstein. Mary was only eighteen when she wrote it. The plot of the story is said to have come from a nightmare she had, following a conversation about galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories. Frankenstein was about a lonely, unhappy monster. A young student called Frankenstein created this monster. The monster wanted the student to love him, but he couldn’t. So the monster got furious and started to kill people.

Mary’s life was unhappy, too. Her mother, sister, and her two children died young. Then Percy died in 1822, when Mary was only 24. She lived until she was 53.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Jane Austen ['ɒstin] was born into a wealthy family in 1775. Austen was born in a small English village. Her family was typically large as was customary at that time in order to counter the possibility of early death by producing many offspring. She had six brothers and a sister.

Jane Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.

Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She reveals not only the difficulties a woman faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer. Austen's works include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Emma.