Authors

Mary Shelley

British 1797 - 1851

Mary Shelley was an English novelist best known for Frankenstein, a pioneering Gothic novel. Born in 1797 to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her life was marked by personal tragedy, including the deaths of her children and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, which influenced her literary work and philosophical views.

The daughter of two of the most prominent radical thinkers and writers of their age, Mary Shelley was born into the heart of one of the most brilliant and creative periods in literary history.

Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, writer and political philosopher, was an ardent advocate for social and educational equality for women; her famous treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) would become a cornerstone of feminism. Her father, philosopher and political theorist William Godwin, was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Believing government to be a corrupting force in society, he was a proponent of anarchism, atheism and personal freedom and responsibility. Both had explored their ideas creatively through novels, Godwin's most famous being Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), and Wollstonecraft's Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798).

Mary Wollstonecraft brought to the marriage her illegitimate daughter Fanny Imlay Godwin, born of her affair with American diplomat and writer Gilbert Imlay whom she had met while living in France at the time of the Revolution. Tragically, Wollstonecraft died of a fever just eleven days after her daughter Mary was born on 30 August 1797, and William Godwin undertook the task of raising both girls with the help of a nanny, Louisa Jones, whom Mary loved as a mother. This deep attachment ended when Mary was three: Louisa started a relationship with one of Godwin's followers and, disapproving of the union, he forbade her from seeing his daughters again. Thus, Mary lost the only mother figure she had ever known.

When Godwin married again in 1801, his new wife Mary Jane Clairmont brought her two illegitimate children to the family: Charles and Clara Mary Jane (Claire). She would have a further child with Godwin, also named William. This complicated and unconventional family characterised by political idealism and financial hardship, was the foundation upon which Mary Shelley built her own unorthodox life.

William Godwin set a high intellectual standard for his family, placing as much emphasis on the encouragement of the imagination as on formal learning. Although Mary had spells at schools including one for the daughters of dissenters at Ramsgate, her most valuable learning experiences came from her exceptional home life. Under Godwin's tutelage, Mary found confidence in her own judgement and in an age of social upheaval and revolution, a sense of responsibility to affect change. She learned ancient and modern history, mythology, literature, Latin, French and art. Her brilliant and famous father attracted many disciples and there were regular visits from some of the most influential writers, scientists and political reformers of the day; she developed an astute awareness of the social and political climate into which she was born. Among these visitors were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, both of whom would influence Mary Shelley's thinking and work.

In 1811, Godwin described his daughter as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind". Mary loved her father and was devoted to him, but her relationship with her stepmother was strained and unhappy; Mary Jane favoured her own children over Wollstonecraft's daughters and resented the attention that they received because of their famous mother. Mary could be volatile and tension in the household led William to send his daughter away. Suffering from a nervous skin complaint, she went to live with the Baxter family in Dundee. Feeling an outsider to the happy family, she yearned for her father, for whom she had developed, as she later wrote: "an excessive and romantic attachment." This painful separation from the father she loved and her need to maintain his devotion would be fundamental to her exploration of familial love and estrangement in her most famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

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"Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge."

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Mary and Percy Shelley’s Love Story

It was on her return to London at the age of sixteen that Mary met the man who would transform her life. Godwin's latest disciple, Percy Bysshe Shelley was the youthful embodiment of all that she admired in her father. Five years her senior and already a published poet, the brilliant young man was the son of a baronet whose admiration for Godwin was such that he was providing him with much needed financial support. At the time married to his first wife Harriet, Percy fell in love with Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's "child of love and light" and the pair began to meet at Mary's mother's grave in St Pancras churchyard. Mary and Percy became lovers, beginning the period that Mary would call 'careless, fearless youth'. Alarmed at this turn of events, Gordwin tried to persuade them to end the relationship, but on the 28 July, 1814, the pair eloped to Paris, taking with them Mary's step sister Claire Clairmont. Furious, Godwin cut contact with his daughter.

In her journal, Mary would describe this heady time and her life with Percy as "very political as well as poetical". Europe was in the grip of the Napoleonic wars and the trio crossed the continent, often on foot, to Lake Lucerne. Mary and Percy would later publish their letters describing this sublime experience as History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817). This would include Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Mont Blanc, where the power of nature is set against the power of the imagination.

During this trip, Mary became pregnant, and Percy and Claire became lovers, all appearing to follow Percy's ardent belief in free, non-possessive love. By now almost penniless, the trio returned to England where, in February 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter Clara, who lived for just two weeks. In her state of deep grief, Mary records dreaming that her baby had only been sleeping and that she had warmed her up and brought her back to life. 'I think about the little thing all day', she wrote. Mary conceived again and in January 1816, gave birth to a son William, named after her father. At the same time, the death of Percy's grandfather left Percy with a legacy that considerably eased the family's financial worries.

As grief over the loss of her daughter had intensified the tensions already present in the unconventional set-up between Percy, Mary and Claire, Mary had asked Claire to leave her household. Ambitious and headstrong, Claire then threw herself into a relationship with the most famous young poet of the day, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and soon became pregnant. In pursuit of her detached and elusive lover, Claire persuaded Percy and Mary with their new baby to accompany her to Switzerland where the poet was renting the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. The events that enfolded during that cold and unsettled summer of 1816 have attained their own legendary status in the history of Romantic literature. On the emotionally charged night of the 15th June, as a storm raged outside, a competition was held to create the most frightening story each could conjure from the depth of their imaginations. In her introduction to the 1831 revised edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley would remember having experienced a 'reverie' or waking nightmare in which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts" create a living being from dead parts. So began the creation of one of the most powerful horror stories ever written.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Frankenstein would merge Mary Shelley's world view in the political climate of her day with her own identity as a motherless young woman emotionally and physically separated from the father she loved. The reformist political ideals espoused by William Godwin and Percy Shelley could have dangerous consequences as witnessed with the bloody Revolution in France, and their rejection of societal convention would have damaging consequences for those closest to them. Both the unconventionality of the Godwin household with its complex interpersonal dynamics and the life she had made with Percy had caused Mary Shelley a great deal of psychological pain. It is therefore unsurprising that Mary, although reformist in her own politics, was in some sympathy with the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke whose Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 would play a seminal role in the political discourse of the day.

Burke believed in the social and political stability created by adherence to the authority of established institutions like the church and the monarchy and he identified the body politic as a natural organism. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley would use the convention of the Gothic novel to explore both the corruption of power and the hubris of mankind in the pursuit of social and scientific advancement. The 'monster' created by the enlightened scientist's interference with nature is symbolic of a deformed and unnatural new order. More personally, the creature's pitiably repulsive condition is a projection of Mary's own sense of rejection and abandonment; through it she confronts her own feelings of rage and despair. The creature is born good but becomes evil when his creator Victor Frankenstein, unable to feel love, turns away in terror and disgust. Rejected by his 'father', he commits his first act of violence on the realisation that he will be forever excluded from the support and love exemplified by the De Lacey family whom he has watched longingly from afar.

In Frankenstein, Mary also would explore her fear and experience of childbirth, the vulnerability and dependency of the baby she had lost and her own capacity to love and to nurture. Her own birth had killed her brilliant mother and Mary was haunted by the possibility that a baby might do the same to her. Before its anonymous publication in 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus would be revised and changes would be made by Percy Shelley, but the book remained fundamentally the work of Mary. Nevertheless, it's strange and terrifying subject matter led critics to believe that it was the work of a man.

Frankenstein marked other births, firstly that of Mary Shelley the novelist; in her introduction to her revised edition of Frankenstein of 1831, Mary would identify the novel itself as her child. It would also mark the creation of a new literary genre that would come to be known as 'science fiction'. Mary was fascinated by science and her years in her father's household had brought her into contact with scientific knowledge and debate. She would draw a distinction between good and bad science, approving of Erasmus Darwin's enlightened seeking of understanding but distrusting any interference with the natural order. Such interventionist science was to her mind dangerous and self-serving. Victor Frankenstein's experiment is closest to the work of the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani and his research into the effects of electricity on animal life.

The Shelley Family's Struggles

On their return to England after that momentous summer, Mary and Percy took lodgings in Bath with Claire close by; she was still concealing her pregnancy from her mother and stepfather. That Autumn, the Godwin and Shelley families were hit by two terrible tragedies. Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay Godwin, still living unhappily with the Godwin family in London, travelled to Swansea where she took an overdose of Laudanum and died. She too had loved Percy and felt excluded from the circle that he had formed with Mary and Claire. Then, on the 9 November, Percy's pregnant wife Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine. With the grief of these loses still raw, Mary married Percy Shelley on the 30 December with the Godwins as witnesses; the breech between father and daughter was now largely healed. Their second daughter, also named Clara, was born in September 1817 and the following March the couple set off for the continent in search of a warmer climate to treat Percy's pulmonary disease. Again, they travelled with Claire Clairmont and her little daughter Clara Allegra Byron, who would tragically die of Typhus at Ravenna.

Their ill-fated time abroad would be marked by one tragedy after another. Based once again in Italy, the Shelleys spent their days reading and writing and regularly changing residence. In November 1818 Clara Shelley died in Venice of dysentery. Her death was followed by William's in April 1819 after he contracted Malaria in Rome. Mary, now pregnant with her fourth child, fell into a deep depression. She withdrew from her husband, blaming him for his failure to care for and protect his family. This was exacerbated by Percy's attraction to other women: he had always emphasised the importance of expansive rather than exclusive love but in practice this was deeply unsatisfactory for Mary who craved physical and emotional stability and it put their marriage under great strain. Nevertheless, she provided Percy with an introductory note to his play The Cenci (1819), a tragedy on the theme of incest and parricide, and it was at this time that Mary began to write her controversial novel Matilda. The story of a father's illicit love for his estranged daughter was not autobiographical, but it drew on her troubled relationships with both William Godwin and Percy Shelley and understandably was not published in her lifetime; it would eventually appear in 1959.

The Shelleys moved on to Florence where their forth and only surviving child Percy Florence Shelley was born in November 1819. From there they went to Pisa and then in May 1822, travelled to Casa Magni at San Terenzo on the bay Lerici to spend the summer with their friends the Williamses. Here, Mary suffered a near fatal miscarriage and then, on 8 July, the tragedy struck that would bring the most important and fulfilling period of Mary Shelley's life to a close. Returning from Livorno where he had travelled to meet the poet and critic Leigh Hunt, Percy's drowned when his boat the Don Juan was caught in a squall in the Gulf of Spezia.

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In deep mourning intensified by a sense of guilt for her growing distance from her husband towards the end of his life, Mary was still confident of her ability to write and earn a living. As a way of atonement she devoted herself to keeping her husband's literary legacy alive by editing and publishing his works. She had hoped to remain on the continent where she felt freer to express herself but this was thwarted by Percy's father who refused Mary financial assistance to bring up her son Percy Florence unless she returned to England. Sir Timothy Shelley also interfered with her wish to bring his son's writing to wider recognition; he did not want the Shelley name in the public domain perhaps because of the scandals that had dogged Percy's life. Mary found ways around this injunction and over the years published a steady stream of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works as well as her own, culminating in her carefully edited four volume The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley published by Edward Moxon in 1839, and the 1840 one volume edition of his works that brought Shelley to prominence as a major author.

Mary Shelley's Later Works

As well as her efforts on behalf of her dead husband, Mary maintained literary ambitions of her own and was still committed to the novel as a means of exploring her ideas and conflicts. The Last Man (1826) is a highly political work of fiction set in the twenty-first century but drawing again on Burke's philosophy and his presentation of the French Revolution as a 'plague' on society, contagious and liable to spread if not severely repressed. The novel depicts a literal plague that, as it sweeps through the world gradually eliminating mankind, exposes the public and private dynamics of power between a small group of individuals. It was also a deeply personal work for Mary Shelley, drawing on her experience of abandonment and isolation after the deaths of her husband and Lord Byron, who had died of fever in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824.

Through the character of Adrian, Mary expressed her continuing anger at Percy's irresponsibility concerning his family's welfare. Despite her dedication to her husband's legacy, she had still not forgiven him. In the character of Lord Raymond, Mary would come to terms with her fascination with Byron for whom she felt a strong physical and mental attraction. After Percy's death she had hoped that Byron would become her protector, but after his initial attentions and offers of financial and emotional support, he had abruptly withdrawn himself to pursue his political ideals in his fight for Greek independence. As with her father William Godwin and her husband Percy Shelley, Byron had let her down. She had defined herself by the men she loved and this had led to disappointment, disillusionment and finally abandonment in death.

The Last Man, with its graphic depiction of war and death, was badly received by critics and did not find public success. Her next work The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), a historical novel strongly influenced by the work of Sir Walter Scott, would examine public and private political dynamics in fifteenth-century England. In her final two novels Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), Mary Shelley would explore themes that had long obsessed her: the relationship of individuals to history and the relationship of daughters to fathers.

She would again draw on deeply personal material, examining the ways in which daughters fail to escape their dependence on their fathers and often marry men who resemble them and take the dominant role in their lives. Yet even as she uncovers these flaws, she still idealises the family as the only place in which a woman can find true love and fulfilment. A loving family embodies the principle of disinterested care which she saw as a political model for a healthy body politic. But she knew the limits of the family; a woman who defines herself solely in terms of these relationships leaves herself open to lack of autonomy, abandonment and loss.

Mary Shelley's Final Years

Mary Shelley made many strong friendships and attachments after her husbands' death: her circle included the writers Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Lamb and his sister Mary, but she would never again find anything approaching the intensity of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley; she received two further offers of marriage but turned both down. Nor did she find lasting fulfilment as a mother. Her devoted son Percy Florence Shelley, after attending Harrow school and then Trinity College Cambridge, had made a conventional and successful marriage and eventually inherited his grandfather's title and estate. But although this was a time of peace, security and relative contentment for Mary, she missed the intellectual stimulation to which she had become accustomed, first in her childhood and then with her husband and their wide circle of friends.

By comparison, Mary found Percy Florence and his wife rather dull. Towards the end of her life Mary had been working on the biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley that would remain unfinished due to her increasing health problems. Tragically, severe headaches and partial paralysis made reading and writing, her two great loves, almost impossible.

On 1 February 1851, Mary Shelley died of a suspected brain tumour at her home in Chester Square, London. She was buried at St Peter's church, Bournemouth, near the Shelley family home in Boscombe. In accordance with her wish, the remains of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were removed from St Pancras churchyard and brought to rest beside her.

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