Mary Shelley
by Helen Edmunson
Monday, October 22 at 7pm (RSVP Online)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.
Mary Shelley by Helen Edmunson centers on a crucial episode in Mary’s early life. Her parents were radical feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin. After Wollstonecraft’s death, the family, now joined by stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont and her daughter, Fanny, are struggling under the weight of heavy debts. When young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley becomes a regular visitor to the house, his financial stability and dangerous charisma charms the family, especially Godwin’s three young daughters. But it is feisty young Mary who becomes the object of his affections. The play details their scandalous elopement when Mary was just sixteen and the impact it has upon her stepmother, her sisters and above all, her troubled father. Three years after this life-changing event, Mary would write one of the greatest novels in the English language, Frankenstein, which changed the literary landscape forever.