Top 3 Mary Shelley Books

It was probably because his father William Godwin, as an avant-garde politician, educated Mary Shelley very liberated from the social, political and moral constraints that limited the woman of the time. The point is that over time an author is discovered who, far beyond her work "Frankstein or the modern Prometheus", devoted herself to literature already steeped in a feminism assumed by her entirely as equality between the sexes.

There was still a long way to go until the right to vote and the effective transfer in a multitude of social aspects. But that naturalness with which Mary Shelley participated in a cultural field mostly associated with the masculine such as literature, served the cause as one of those necessary steps, perhaps not so allegedly feminist but authentically enlightening about equal capacities.

When we read any account of PoeTo quote someone contemporary and with a certain thematic similarity at certain times, or we go into the novel Frankstein, we discover that naturalized equality. It does not matter to read one or the other, and that is due to the self-sufficient idea of ​​a born author convinced of the worth of the person without sex labels.

But in addition to that integrating function of the writer and her work, and beyond her masterpiece Frankstein, probably a hazy translation of her tragic relationship with life and death (sticking to her biography, nothing less than the death of her mother she died at birth, the death of two of her three children and the subsequent death of her husband drowned in the sea), we also find the author cultivated in great references such as Walter Scott or his own father William Godwin. Only that Mary Shelley, conditioned by her fatal circumstances, gave herself to a gothic where to disguise her sorrow and to a fatalism on which to pour her hopelessness.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Mary Shelley

Frankstein or the modern Prometheus

Prometheus took it upon himself to steal fire for men. The symbol of this myth ended up transcending in Western culture as control over light and life.

Hence the approach of a novel about science capable of generating human life thanks to a spark of that fire of the gods was closed with that original tagline, today already shelved on many occasions. The best thing about this novel is its double reading.

Because beyond the mere fanciful fact that it has given to many replicas of terror in literature and cinema, the idea of ​​life, of its fragility, of the possibility that science will ever come to emulate that God who generates life also transcends. , or that electrical spark from which the first beat of a heart is born.

The idea sounded monstrous at the time since the idea was to recover someone who had already died. And yet, the author is capable of awakening that humanity in the face of minority and eccentricity.

Frankstein is an abominable being and at the same time a wandering soul, without much sense, as he can sometimes consider any human to be faced with his existence ...

Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus

Transformation and other stories

A smooth transition to the rest of Mary Shelley's work. Three stories that delve into that Gothic touch in the formal, disturbing and disconcerting in the background.

The first story, Transformation, takes references to contacts between humans and supernatural beings from the popular imagination and ends up narrating a terrifying interaction of the human with its ancestral demons.

The second story is The Immortal Mortal, where the fantastic aspect of life and death takes on another aspect. A guy with several centuries behind him talks about eternity, about his passage through the world with his extraordinary nature and, however, also connecting with the most human passions, those that can only give meaning to a life of 10 or 1.000 years.

Close this volume The Evil Eye, a true insight into old beliefs and tricks, in that black magic that only human beings could use for revenge and destruction.

Transformation and other stories

The Last Man

Mary Shelley's next great novel was never fully attended to. Perhaps it was because a woman was culturally allowed to write about supposed fantastic plots like Frankestein's (although in the end the author cast a work with that duality between fiction and existentialism), but other narrative proposals were not allowed in which the woman intended directly equate to the intellectual, moral and cultural capacity of man to pose a plot about a global drift ...

Be that as it may, to approach this novel with apocalyptic overtones today is to enjoy Mary Shelley without so much gothic artifice. The characters of Adrian and Raymond represent liberated men who decide to face different fates than those marked.

Only that the circumstances are being marked by an epidemic that threatens to be an annihilating pandemic of everything human. Only then is when the most gothic part returns to the plot to provide that point of terror that supposes thinking about an end to everything.

The Last Man
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