Excerpt from Letters of Mary W. Shelley: Mostly Unpublished; With Introduction and Notes Mary Shelley first became widely known when as a girl of sixteen she ran away, in the early morning of July 28, 1814, with the now immortal poet, who was then un happily married to Harriet Westbrook;but at that time, aside from being the grandson of an English baronet, he had achieved comparatively little that gave promise of immortality. Four months earlier he had written to a\ friend, I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion which renders me dead to every thing but the unenviable capacity of in dulging the vanity of hope, and a terrible susceptibility to objects of disgust and hatred. I live here like the insect that sports in a transient sunbeam, which the next cloud shall obscure forever. That one hope proved to be Mary, who apparently revived his spirits, for in the inspiring companionship of this talented girl he produced most of the work by which he so greatly enriched the world's literature. Considering the fact that Mary had been obliged to live under the same roof with her father, the nagging, parasitical William Godwin, and a stepmother who was not famed for her tenderheartedness, it is not surprising that she should have run away with somebody, or anybody. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.