A Level Gothic Authors.

So I've recently finished reading my A2 level English Literature books and thought I should do a quick background check and blog on the authors of the 3 novels/plays/short stories I've just read.

The first, and most probably famous, of my texts, is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818 text).

Mary Shelley:

Mary Shelley was born on the 30th August 1797 and died on February 1st 1851.
She is best known for her gothic novel Frankenstein.
Her husband was called Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she, on occasions, edited and promoted her husbands work as her husband was a famous romantic poet and philosopher.
Her farther was political philosopher William Goodwin.
Her mother was a protestant and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
She also wrote Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826).  
She died at the age of 45. She died in her sleep, due to what her physician assumed was a brain tumour.
Shelley was only 19 when she wrote and completed Frankenstein.
The idea of Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley as the result of a ghost story contest between Mary, her husband, the poet Lord Byron and Dr Jon Polidori. It came to her in a dream.

Many people have also found it quite ironic how Mary Shelley's fiction scientist Victor Frankenstein found his name forever fused with the name of his creation and how Mary Shelley is now forever associated with her greatest creation; her novel Frankenstein.

Now on to my next author, Angela Carter, who wrote several short stories, her most famous being The Bloody Chamber.

Angela Carter:

Angela Carter was an English novelist and journalist.
She is most commonly known for her feminist and magical realism works.
In 2008, The Times ranked Carter 10th in their list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945".
During her childhood Angela Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother.
She battled anorexia when she was a teenager.
She studied English Literature at Bristol University and then became a fellow in creative writing at Sheffield University.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter, she used the proceeds from her Somerset Maugham Awards to leaver her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan.
The Bloody Chamber was written in 1979 along with her influential essay The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, which hints about her ideas behind the message in The Bloody Chamber.
She died in February 1992.

And for my final author, it is none other than Christopher Marlowe, who created the play, Doctor Faustus.

Christopher Marlowe: 

He was born in 1564 and died in 1593.
His father was a shoemaker.
He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He was a dramatist, translator and a poet.
Some of his most famous plays and books were: Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great.
There is great mystery surrounding the death of Marlowe. A warrant was issued by the Church's Star Chamber for the poet's arrest on charges of heresy, which carried the death penalty, but, before Marlowe faced the interrogation and possible torture, he died.
His plays were produced to great acclaim by the Lord Admiral's company.
He also mixed with the dramatists and actors of the day. such as Shakespeare, Edward Alleyn and Nashe.
Many believe he influenced Shakespeare, however, this has not been proven conclusively.

I'll be blogging over the next week or so about the texts I've just read because if I started tonight I would not finish. So yeah, over the next week I'll blog about the texts I've read for my Eng Lit course.