Jane Austen
(16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of
romantic fiction are critically acclaimed and very popular and influential.Austen’s works critique
the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-
century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on
marriage to secure social standing and economic security, and are often considered feminist. 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 widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. Her novels
include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma
(1815) Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous), and Persuasion (1818, posthumous). They are
widely available in English.
Mary Russell Mitford
(16 December 1787 – 10 January 1855), was an English author and
dramatist. She was born at Alresford, Hampshire. She is most noted as the author of Our Village:
Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery. This series of about 100 literary sketches of rural life was
based upon life in Three Mile Cross, a hamlet in the parish of Shinfield, near Reading in Berkshire,
where she lived. It was originally published during the 1820s and 1830s, and first appeared in The
Lady’s Magazine. It is widely available in English.
Mary Shelley
(née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a
British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for
her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted
the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. One summer,
while sitting around a log fire at Lord Byron’s villa with friends and reading German ghost stories,
Byron suggested they each write their own supernatural tale. Shortly afterwards, in a waking dream,
Mary Godwin conceived the idea for Frankenstein: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out,
and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half
vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human
endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” She began writing what
she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley’s encouragement, she expanded this tale
into her first novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later
described that summer in Switzerland as the moment “when I first stepped out from childhood into
life”. Frankenstein is considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction, and science
fiction author Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction
story, because unlike in previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later science
fiction, the central character “makes a deliberate decision” and “turns to modern experiments in the
laboratory” to achieve fantastic results. The story is partially based on Giovanni Aldini’s electrical
experiments on dead and (sometimes) living animals and was also a warning against the expansion
of modern humans in the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.
It has had a considerable influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete
genre of horror stories and films. Frankenstein is actually the name of the scientist and not the
monster in the novel. Shelley’s works are widely available in English.
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