Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English
novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), an early
example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of
her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley, who
drowned in a sailing accident in 1822. Scholarly appreciation has
increased in recent decades for her novels, including Valperga, Perkin
Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and the apocalyptic The Last Man, as well as
her biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia.
The influences of her mother, the philosopher and feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft, are evident in Shelley's travel narrative Rambles in
Germany and Italy. Shelley often argued in favour of cooperation and
sympathy as skills for reforming civil society; this view challenged the
individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by her husband and the
Enlightenment ideals of her father, William Godwin.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
526:
Upon the death of her father Theodoric the Great, Amalasuintha
of the Ostrogoths became the regent for her ten-year-old son Athalaric.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalasuintha>
1914:
World War I: The Battle of Tannenberg resulted in the almost
complete destruction of the Russian 2nd Army by the German 8th Army.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tannenberg>
1974:
An express train carrying foreign workers from Yugoslavia to
West Germany derailed in Zagreb, killing 153 people.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb_train_disaster>
2014:
Prime minister of Lesotho Tom Thabane fled to South Africa,
claiming that the army had launched a coup d'état.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Lesotho_political_crisis>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
xerocracy:
(informal) Political influence achieved by copying and distributing
leaflets and similar material.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xerocracy>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin
it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
--Warren Buffett
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett>