A better view of Mary Shelley is Lita Judge’s Mary’s Monster. Verdict: By omitting the stressful relationship between Mary and her stepmother and attributing childhood issues to her father, Reef has restructured the biographical information and left out part of the impetus for Mary running away. Small black and white vintage illustrations have been added to the text. Well educated, Shelley suffered terrible losses but managed to write seven novels.

Mary ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen. In between, she ran away from home at 16 with the charismatic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, lost all except one of four children at early ages, and traveled throughout Europe until she returned to England after her husband’s drowning when she was 24. Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein’s Creator by Catherine Reef The story of Frankenstein’s creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself. The daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft led an unorthodox life from the time of her widowed father’s remarriage when she was four years old to her death at the age of 53 and her son’s discovery that she had kept what was assumed to be her husband’s heart after his cremation. For example, her 2018 publication Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of. Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein’s Creator. Catherine Reefs biographies offer an in-depth study of legendary figures who.

She lives in College Park, Maryland.Reef, Catherine. Includes index.Ĭatherine Reef is the award-winning author of more than forty nonfiction books for young people and adults, many of them biographies about influential women in history, including the highly praised Florence Nightingale. Success soon followed for Mary, but also great tragedy and misfortune.Ĭatherine Reef brings this passionate woman, brilliant writer, and forgotten feminist into crisp focus, detailing a life that was remarkable both before and after the publication of her iconic masterpiece.

It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad scientist who brought a corpse back to life. The story of Frankenstein's creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself. On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history.

Mary Shelley by Catherine Reef