He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

About The Modern Library

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

MARY SHELLEY

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher and novelist. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died of sepsis ten days after giving birth to her. Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, their next-door neighbor, when Mary was four, and she was raised in an extended family that included a stepsister, Jane, and a half sister, Fanny Imlay. Largely self-educated—a source of some mortification to her—she was made aware from an early age that she was destined for, if not greatness, a respectable writing career. Her father founded a publishing company that he operated out of their house, and frequent visitors included Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet; the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in their living room very late one night. Mary and Jane, ignoring their curfew, hid behind the couch to listen.

She spent part of her early teens in the Scottish countryside with family friends. On one return from Scotland to London, in May 1814, three months before her seventeenth birthday, she fell in love with Shelley. They eloped to France, accompanied by Jane. Godwin, despite lifelong professions of his belief in free love, protested; on their first day abroad, in Calais, “a fat lady…arrived,” Shelley wrote, in a diary he and Mary kept jointly, “who said that I had run away with her daughter.” Mrs. Godwin could not persuade either girl to go back to London with her, and left alone after a night’s argument. Mary, Shelley, and Jane (who now called herself “Claire”) went to Paris and continued on to Switzerland by mule, returning in September to London, where they rented an apartment. Shelley continued intermittently to see Harriet, who was pregnant with their second child.