Welcoming all library members to our monthly book club meet to connect with avid readers, discuss interesting books from our library collection, and deepen your engagement with books, stories, and people from across cultures and backgrounds.
The book club is free and open to all members.
- Date: Saturday, 26 August 2023
- Time: 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
- Ages: 18 and above
Join us this month for a lively discussion on the works of Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley was an English novelist whose work has reached all corners of the globe. Author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Shelley was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the famous defender of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft.
A ghost-writing contest on a stormy June night in 1816 inspired Frankenstein, often called the first true work of science-fiction. Superficially a Gothic novel, influenced by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, it was concerned with the destructive nature of power when allied to wealth.
In 1822, Mary Shelley pursued a very successful writing career as a novelist, biographer, and travel writer. She also edited and promoted her husband’s poems and other writings.
We have picked two of her classiest stories to read and discuss!
- Frankenstein
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with gothic and romantic elements. In the story, scientist, Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing God and attempting the engineering of life.
- The Last Man
Mary Shelley, wrote the apocalyptic novel, The Last Man in 1826. Its first-person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and after the devastating effects of a plague at the end of humanity. In the book Shelly writes of weaving this story from a discovery of prophetic writings uncovered in a cave near Naples. The Last Man was made into a film in 2008.
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