Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in Somers Town, then a district on the northern edge of London ^[1]. Her parents were famous before she drew breath. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and her father, William Godwin, was the political philosopher behind An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Wollstonecraft died of an infection eleven days after the birth, leaving Godwin to raise Mary and her half-sister Fanny Imlay alone ^[1].

Godwin remarried in 1801. His new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought two children of her own into the household, including Claire Clairmont, who would remain entangled in Mary's life for decades. Relations between Mary and her stepmother were strained, and the girl found refuge in books, in her father's remarkable circle of visitors, and in visits to her mother's grave at St Pancras churchyard, where she taught herself to read by tracing the letters of Wollstonecraft's name ^[2].

She received no formal schooling of the conventional kind, but the Godwin house doubled as an intellectual salon and a publishing business. Samuel Taylor Coleridge recited The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the family parlour while young Mary listened from behind a sofa, according to accounts preserved by her biographers ^[2]. In 1812 Godwin sent her to stay with the Baxter family in Dundee, Scotland, a period she later credited with feeding her imagination. Basic Mary Shelley facts often begin with Frankenstein, but her education in radical thought began at home, years before she wrote a word of fiction.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devoted admirer of Godwin's philosophy, began visiting the household in 1812. He was married. That did not prevent an intense attachment forming between him and the sixteen-year-old Mary, and in July 1814 the pair eloped to the Continent, taking Claire Clairmont with them ^[3]. Godwin, despite his own published attacks on the institution of marriage, refused to speak to his daughter for years. The travellers crossed war-scarred France on foot and by mule, an experience Mary later shaped into her first book, History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published anonymously in 1817 ^[3].

The following years brought hardship. Mary gave birth in February 1815 to a premature daughter who died within weeks, a loss recorded in her journal alongside a dream that the baby had been revived by warmth ^[4]. A son, William, was born in 1816. That summer the couple travelled to Lake Geneva to join Lord Byron, whom Claire Clairmont had pursued into an affair.

The wet, gloomy summer of 1816, chilled across Europe by the eruption of Mount Tambora the previous year, confined the party indoors at the Villa Diodati. Byron proposed that each guest write a ghost story. After days without an idea, Mary experienced what she later described as a waking vision of a student kneeling beside the thing he had assembled. From that image grew Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus ^[4]. She was eighteen when she began it. Late in 1816 her half-sister Fanny died by suicide, and Percy's wife Harriet drowned in the Serpentine; Mary and Percy married on December 30, 1816, at St Mildred's Church in London ^[3].

Frankenstein appeared anonymously in January 1818 in an edition of just 500 copies, with a preface by Percy Shelley that led many reviewers to assume he was the author ^[5]. The novel asked what a creator owes his creation, wrapping the question in a frame of Arctic exploration, Genevan domesticity, and Gothic horror. Critics were divided, readers were not, and stage adaptations began within five years. Scholars now routinely treat the book as a founding text of science fiction, because its horror springs from a scientific act rather than a supernatural one ^[5]. A revised edition under Mary Shelley's own name, with a new introduction explaining the Geneva origin story, followed in 1831.

Any fair account of Mary Shelley achievements has to move past that single book. Valperga, a historical novel set in fourteenth-century Italy, appeared in 1823. The Last Man (1826) imagined a plague destroying humanity by the end of the twenty-first century, an idea so bleak that reviewers savaged it; twentieth-century critics recovered it as a landmark of apocalyptic fiction ^[6]. Three further novels followed: The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837).

She was also a working woman of letters in the plainest sense. She wrote short stories for the annual gift books that paid well in the 1820s and 1830s, contributed five volumes of biographical essays on Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French writers to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia between 1835 and 1839, and produced the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1844 ^[6]. Her editions of Percy Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824) and Poetical Works (1839), with the biographical notes his family barred her from expanding into a full life, did more than any other effort to build his Victorian reputation ^[7].

Grief shadowed almost every year of her marriage. Of the four children Mary bore, only one survived childhood. Her daughter Clara died in Venice in 1818, aged one, and her son William died of malaria in Rome in June 1819, aged three ^[3]. Mary fell into a depression she described in her journals with unsparing honesty. The birth of Percy Florence Shelley in Florence in November 1819 gave her a reason, she wrote, to go on. In 1822 she nearly died of a miscarriage at Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia; Percy packed the wound with ice, an intervention doctors later credited with saving her life ^[4].

Weeks afterward, on July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat, the Don Juan, went down in a storm off the Italian coast. Mary was twenty-four, widowed, nearly penniless, and responsible for a two-year-old son ^[3]. Her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, offered support for the boy only on conditions, at one point demanding the child be surrendered to a guardian, which Mary refused. She returned to England in 1823 and lived thereafter on a small allowance from Sir Timothy, her earnings from writing, and relentless economy.

She never remarried, despite proposals and rumoured attachments, including interest from the American actor John Howard Payne. Her circle included writers, actors, and political exiles, and she quietly helped friends whose irregular situations, illegitimate children, and same-sex partnerships put them outside respectable society, a generosity documented in her letters ^[7].

The 1830s and 1840s brought a measure of stability. Percy Florence entered Harrow and then Trinity College, Cambridge, with his grandfather grudgingly paying the fees ^[6]. Mary's own literary labour continued: the Lardner biographical essays, the 1839 Shelley editions, journalism, and the two-volume Rambles in Germany and Italy, which grew out of European journeys taken with her son and his university friends. That travel book carried a political edge, arguing sympathetically for the cause of Italian independence at a time when the subject drew little English attention ^[6].

Her final decade was quieter and harder. She was blackmailed twice in 1845, once by an Italian political adventurer holding compromising letters and once by a man calling himself G. Byron who forged Shelley correspondence; she dealt with both threats largely on her own ^[7]. Headaches and episodes of partial paralysis, symptoms consistent with the brain tumour that eventually killed her, began in the late 1840s and ended her writing life.

Sir Timothy Shelley died in 1844, at the age of ninety, and Percy Florence inherited the baronetcy and the estate. His marriage in 1848 to Jane St John, a widow who revered Mary, gave her a devoted daughter-in-law and a comfortable home. Mary Shelley died at her house in Chester Square, London, on February 1, 1851, aged fifty-three ^[1]. She was buried at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, where her son had the remains of Godwin and Wollstonecraft reburied beside her ^[2].

For a century after her death, Mary Shelley was remembered chiefly as a wife: the editor of Percy Shelley's poems and the keeper of his flame. Her son and daughter-in-law encouraged that image, and early biographies followed it. The recovery began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist scholars re-read the novels, and accelerated with the publication of her complete journals and letters, which revealed a disciplined professional writer and a sharper political intelligence than the Victorian portrait allowed ^[7]. Any serious Mary Shelley biography written since then treats her as a major Romantic author, not an appendage to one.

Frankenstein itself has never gone out of print. The creature entered common speech, the 1931 Boris Karloff film fixed a face on it, and the novel's questions about scientific responsibility resurface with every advance in genetics, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering ^[5]. The word Frankenstein is now applied, usually inaccurately, to the products of unchecked invention, a sign of how completely the story escaped its covers.

Her other work continues to gain readers. The Last Man is taught as an early pandemic novel, her short fiction is anthologised, and her journals are mined by historians of the Romantic period. In 2018, the bicentenary of Frankenstein prompted exhibitions, new editions, and academic conferences across Europe and North America ^[5]. The teenager who answered Byron's ghost-story challenge has outlasted nearly everyone who was in the room.