Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. Mary insisted that women must be educated according to their class, since they had the major responsibility educating the nation's children. Mary was a radical thinker throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic views promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories of her father William Godwin. Percy Blysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) was a major English Romantic poet who was considered to be the greatest lyric poet in the English language. His major works were long visionary poems including, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley was a strong advocate for social justice for the 'lower classes'. He witnessed many of the mistreatments occurring in the domestication and slaughtering of animals and he became a fighter for the rights of all living things.