Unpublished Mary Shelley Letters Discovered In A British Archive

More than a dozen previously unpublished letters by Frankenstein author were found

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A professor in the U.K. has stumbled upon 13 unpublished letters from Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.

Nora Crook, a professor emerita at Anglia Ruskin University, found the letters while doing online research on a 19th-century novelist. An internet search brought up a listing at the Essex Record Office, headed as, “Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.”

“I thought: ‘What is this?’ and clicked on the link,” Crook told the Guardian. “I knew right away they had never been published before.”

The Guardian calls Crook’s discovery “the largest collection of unpublished letters by the author of Frankenstein to be discovered in decades.” The letters, which were written between 1831 and 1849, were addressed to Horace Smith—a friend of the author’s late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley—and Smith’s daughter Eliza. In her messages, Shelley describes her health and her son. Crook also noted that in the letters, “Mary Shelley’s personality emerges.”

[Guardian]