Shelley’s Ghost

Percy Bysshe Shelley was but one prominent member of a celebrated literary family. His second wife, Mary, wrote one of the most lasting novels of the early 19th century, Frankenstein. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were central figures in the English Enlightenment. The exhibition Shelley’s Ghost tells the remarkable — sometimes salacious — tale of this extraordinary circle of people with artifacts from The New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, in England.

About the Exhibition

Copresented by The New York Public Library and The Bodleian Library at Oxford University

Public Programs Calendar

Special programs hosted in conjunction with the exhibition at NYPL

Suggested Reading

Books about the Shelley family and more

Educator Resources

Activities for middle and high school students

About the Pforzheimer

One of the world's leading repositories for the study of English Romanticism

About the Bodleian

The largest university library system in the U.K.

Credits

The people behind this website

Featured Stories

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Radical, Lover, Atheist, Poet

One of the great English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a brief, eventful, and scandalous life. He twice eloped with a 16-year-old girl, was ostracized for his radical political views, and was forced to spend his final years in exile.

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Mary Shelley: An Unconventional Visionary

The most enduring work of the Romantic period was written not by Percy Bysshe Shelley — or Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, or Coleridge — but by the teenaged Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, the archetypal parable of modern civilization.

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Mary Shelley’s Mounseer Nongtongpaw

Based on a comic song, Mounseer Nongtongpaw played on French and English national stereotypes. Mary Shelley, aged 10, likely played a small part in the book’s genesis. Watch an animated version of the story.

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William Godwin: Revolutionary Father

During the political turmoil in England precipitated by the French Revolution, Godwin made a name for himself as an innovative, radical thinker with his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, considered the first expression of modern anarchist philosophy.

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Mary Wollstonecraft: Early Feminist

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a radical and groundbreaking work that addressed the plight of the voiceless half of the human race passed over by the architects of the revolutions in America and France.

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Byron and Shelley

Lord Byron’s fame contrasted with that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose reputation grew only after his death. In many ways, the two were opposites, but they recognized each other’s genius and were drawn together as fellow exiles and outsiders.

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The Shelley/Godwin Family Tree

Explore the history of the Shelley and Godwin families.

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