<P> Mary Shelley (1797--1851) is remembered as the author of Frankenstein (1818). The plot of this is said to have come from a waking dream she had, in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, following a conversation about galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life, and on the experiments of the 18th - century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter . Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale . </P> <P> Jane Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th - century realism . Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security . Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married . She reveals not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow . This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve . Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer . The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture . Austen's works include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817) and Persuasion (1817). </P> <P> Byron, Keats and Shelley all wrote for the stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's The Cenci perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in England until a century after his death . Byron's plays, along with dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through these versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today . If contemporary poets had little success on the stage, the period was a legendary one for performances of Shakespeare, and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to them . The greatest actor of the period, Edmund Kean, restored the tragic ending to King Lear; Coleridge said that, "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning ." </P> <P> Wales had its own Romantic movement, especially in Welsh literature (which was rarely translated or known outside Wales). The countryside and history of Wales exerted an influence on the Romantic imagination of Britons, especially in travel writings, and the poetry of Wordsworth . </P>

Concerns of the romantic literary circle in the early 19th century