Selling Fast
Perfect Additions
Frankenstein
English novelist Mary Shelley (1797–1851), was the daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft. Educated at home following her mother’s death when she was just days old, Shelley was tutored to a high level and met several of her father’s intellectual friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Aged 16, she eloped to Italy with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley whom she later married. Her best-known work, Frankenstein, was first published in 1818 and significantly revised by the author in 1831. Shelley returned to England after her husband’s death and continued to write novels, including The Last Man (1826, The Folio Society 2012), short stories and reviews, as well as promoting her husband’s work. She died in London on 1 February 1851 aged 53.
Richard Holmes is an award-winning British author best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. His books include the classic Footsteps (1985) and its companion volume Sidetracks (2000); Shelley: The Pursuit, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, which won the 1989 Whitbread Biography of the Year; Coleridge: Darker Reflections, winner of both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award in 1998; The Age of Wonder (2008; The Folio Society 2015) which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (USA); Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013), which inspired the feature film The Aeronauts (Amazon, 2019); and This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (2017). Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, and in 2014 the Biographers’ Club Prize for Lifetime Services to Biography.