Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Mary Shelley (1797–1851)

It’s no wonder London-born writer Mary Shelley is considered one of the original cool goth kids—she was a little . . . morbid. Tragedy consumed the visionary writer’s life, from the suicide of her sister to the deaths of three of her children. 
Shelley conceived of her Gothic horror novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus on a dare: One rainy evening, her and Lord Byron’s occult-obsessed clique gathered to tell ghost stories. Byron proposed a dare: to challenge the writers to pen a ghost story superior to the ones they had just read. It inspired quiet nineteen-year-old Shelley, who seldom took center stage at these intellectual salons, to write Frankenstein, the story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who creates a murderous, existential angst-ridden monster. 
Shelley published the iconic, critically praised work anonymously in 1818. Its true power, however, echoes throughout an entire genre of pop culture that the novel spawned. Many literature scholars consider Frankenstein to be the first work of science fiction ever written, with Shelley launching the genre. It might be unsurprising that innovative thinking came naturally—Shelley’s mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored the seminal A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the first texts on feminist philosophy. 

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Though beautifully memorialized by Nicole Kidman in the film The Hours, modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s life was far more layered than a cinematic slice of life could portray. Her story also encompasses mental illness, a staggering impact on twentieth-century modernism, and her feminist oeuvre, namely the oft-quoted extended essay A Room of One’s Own. In it, she declares, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” 
Her most read works include Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse, wherein which her visionary imagination, nonlinear plots, and stream-of-consciousness literary style shone through.
Tragedies also marked Woolf’s life: The death of her mother to rheumatic fever in 1895 when Woolf was thirteen led to her first breakdown, which was exacerbated once her father died later in 1904. Her novels, namely Mrs. Dalloway, contemplated suicide—which sadly was the cause of Woolf’s death in 1941.