Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s (1797-1851) work crosses over many genres (essays, biographies, short stories, and dramas) and often contain autobiographical elements. She came from an intellectual family of writers. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was well known for her feminist writings. Alas, she died ten days after giving birth to her namesake.
Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, one of the most memorable stories of all time. It was her first novel, published in 1818, when she was barely twenty-one. It is still widely read and studied today. And of course, it has been referenced and reworked in numerous formats, though the Hollywood versions bare scant resemblance to the original. A novel filled with universal themes like creation, maternal instinct, and death, it’s a pioneer in the tradition of the Gothic novel. The struggle of good and evil lies at the root of the story.
Major Works
More Information
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on Wikipedia
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology & Resource Site
- The Shelley-Godwin Archive
- The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes
“It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.”
“The beginning is always today.”
“My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“Live, and be happy, and make others so.”
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”
“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… (From a journal entry, May 15, 1824)
“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.” (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were.”
“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene sky amidst these verdant woods: yet I loved all the changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights with them. When rocked by the waves of the lake my spirits rose in triumph as a horseman feels with pride the motions of his high fed steed.
But my pleasures arose from the contemplation of nature alone, I had no companion: my warm affections finding no return from any other human heart were forced to run waste on inanimate objects.” (Matilda, 1819)
“Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”
“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… (Journal entry on the writing of her science-fiction novel The Last Man, May 14, 1824)
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.”
“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” (Her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein)
“A truce to philosophy! — Life is before me and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. (The Last Man, 1826)
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.”
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.”
“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
“My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.” (Her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein)
“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.” (Her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein)
“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”
“…once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.” (Frankenstein, 1818)
“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.” (Her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein)
“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”
“A truce to philosophy!—Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change, and the to come is all my own.”
