Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London on 30 August 1797, the daughter of two of the most famous radicals of the age. Her mother, the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days after her birth. Her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, raised her among his books and visitors, and remarried when she was four. In 1814, at sixteen, she eloped to the Continent with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. They married in 1816 after his first wife’s suicide.

That summer, at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story. Mary’s became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in 1818. Another member of the party, Byron’s physician John Polidori, began “The Vampyre” during the same visit. Four years of travel, debt and grief in Italy followed; three of the Shelleys’ four children died young. Percy drowned in a sailing accident off the Italian coast in July 1822.

Mary Shelley lived for almost thirty more years and worked as a professional writer for nearly all of them, supporting herself and her surviving son, Percy Florence. She wrote novels, including The Last Man (1826), about the end of humanity in a plague; biographies for an encyclopedia; travel books; and edited editions of her husband’s poems. She also wrote short stories for the fashionable gift-book annuals of the period. She died in London on 1 February 1851.

Both stories here come from one of those annuals, The Keepsake, which commissioned stories to accompany engravings. Transformation (1830) is a Gothic tale in which a disinherited young nobleman meets a hideous dwarf on a stormy shore and makes a bargain to exchange bodies with him. It is a story about doubles and about wasted chances. The Mortal Immortal (1833) is narrated by a man who, as an alchemist’s apprentice, drank half of an elixir of immortality, and who has had three centuries to regret it. It’s wry and sad, and it suits a reading from the author of Frankenstein: another story about what happens when science gives someone what they asked for.