Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) is by far best known for her legendary 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Or: The Modern Prometheus, in which she essentially invented the genre of science fiction. Married, at the time, to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who purpled up the prose of Frankenstein quite a bit), she famously came up with the idea for the story for a ghost-story competition during "Year Without a Summer" between her, Percy, Lord Byron, Mary's step-sister and Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori, and wouldn't you have liked to be a fly on the wall for that gathering. She went on to write several other novel, travelogues, and biographies and appears to have been rather a political radical, possibly influenced by the works (if not the specific ideas) of her father, anarchistic philosopher William Godwin, and her mother, noted women's rights activist and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (whom Mary Shelley herself never knew).
Published in 1811 under the creative pseudonym of "A Lady," this was Jane Austen's first published novel (Pride and Prejudice was written first, but published later.) One of the prototypes of what would eventually be called the "romantic comedy," it focuses on the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, and their vastly different temperaments. Elinor is calm, sensible, and reserved, while Marianne allows every feeling to be the MOST IMPORTANT FEELING EVER. How they respectively fare in romance is the main of the plot, but as important (and often forgotten by those with only a passing acquaintance with Austen's work) is a razor sharp wit that also makes this one of the prototypical comedies of manners.
Volume One, Letters I to IV:
