Mary Shelley

• 1. Introduction

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  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on the 30th of August 1797 in Somers Town, London, and she died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square. In the fifty-three years between those dates, she wrote the novel that gave the world its most enduring image of science outrunning conscience. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus appeared in 1818 and has never gone out of print. But who was the woman behind it? Her mother died eleven days after her birth. Her father was one of the most radical political philosophers in England. At sixteen, she ran off to France with a married poet. She lost three children before the age of twenty-five. Her husband drowned when she was twenty-four. And for the remaining three decades of her life, she fought to keep herself and her surviving son alive through her pen, while also quietly making the case that Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the greatest poets in the language. The question scholars have been wrestling with ever since is why it took until the 1970s for anyone to ask seriously whether Mary Shelley herself deserved the same attention.

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• 2. A Radical Inheritance

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  William Godwin, her father, was one of the founding voices of anarchist political philosophy in Britain. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and died of puerperal fever just eleven days after giving birth to her daughter. Godwin was left to raise two children: Mary, and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's daughter by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, intending it as a compassionate tribute. Because the Memoirs frankly disclosed her affairs and her illegitimate child, they were received as scandalous. Mary grew up reading those Memoirs and her mother's books, trained from childhood to regard intellectual life as a birthright. Godwin tutored her broadly, took the children on educational outings, and gave her access to his library and to the many thinkers who visited, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former United States vice-president Aaron Burr. At age fifteen, her father described her as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible." In June 1812, he sent her north to stay with the radical William Baxter near Dundee, writing to Baxter: "I am anxious that she should be brought up... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." She returned north in the summer of 1813 for a further stay of ten months. That Scottish landscape, with its woodless mountains and open grounds, would later surface in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein as the place where her "true compositions" were born.

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• 3. Flight and Loss

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  By the time Mary Godwin returned home for the second time on the 30th of March 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley had become estranged from his wife and was a regular visitor to her father's house, seeking partly to absorb Godwin's political ideas and partly to bail him out of debt. Mary and Percy began meeting secretly at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and on the 26th of June 1814, Percy declared that he could not hide his "ardent passion". On the 28th of July, the couple eloped to France, taking Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont along. They travelled through a country ravaged by war, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, reaching Gravesend, Kent, on the 13th of September 1814. Mary was already pregnant. Her father refused to have anything to do with her. On the 22nd of February 1815, she gave birth to a two-month premature baby girl. On the 6th of March, she wrote to her friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg: "My dearest Hogg my baby is dead, will you come to see me as soon as you can." The letter ended, "for I am no longer a mother now." The loss produced acute depression. She recovered by summer, and on the 24th of January 1816, her second child, William, nicknamed "Willmouse", was born. Percy and Mary still could not marry, because Percy's wife Harriet was still alive. On the 10th of October 1816, Harriet's half-sister Fanny Imlay was found dead in a Swansea inn; and on the 10th of December, Percy's wife Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Both suicides were hushed up. On the 30th of December 1816, Percy and Mary married at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London. Her father was a witness who signed the register.

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• 4. The Geneva Summer

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  In May 1816, Mary, Percy, their infant son William, and Claire Clairmont travelled to Geneva, where Claire's recent affair with Lord Byron had left her pregnant. Byron joined the party on the 25th of May with his young physician John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati close to Lake Geneva in the village of Cologny. Mary remembered 1831: "It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." Sitting around a log fire at the Villa Diodati, the group read German ghost stories until Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story". Mary could think of nothing. Each morning someone would ask her whether she had thought of a story. Each morning she had to admit she had not. Then one mid-June evening, the conversation turned to the nature of the principle of life and whether a corpse could be reanimated, with galvanism offered as evidence of the possibility. That night, unable to sleep, she experienced a "waking dream" so vivid she later transcribed it almost whole: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion." She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. Percy encouraged her to expand it, and the result, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was published on the 1st of January 1818. In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson concluded, after studying data on the motion of the moon and stars, that the waking dream took place between two and three in the morning on the 16th of June 1816.

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• 5. Authorship Under Dispute

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  Frankenstein appeared anonymously in 1818, dedicated to William Godwin and prefaced by Percy Shelley. Reviewers and readers assumed Percy had written it. The question of how much he contributed has never fully gone away. Mary Shelley herself drew a careful line: "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She also wrote that the preface to the first edition was Percy's work, "as far as I can recollect". Scholars have divided sharply over what Percy's notebooks reveal. James Rieger concluded that Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator". Anne K. Mellor later argued he had only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text". Charles E. Robinson, who edited a facsimile of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions were no more than what any good editor or colleague provides. The debate sharpened on the novel's two hundredth anniversary. Literary scholar and poet Fiona Sampson, having examined the notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, wrote in her 2018 book In Search of Mary Shelley that Percy "did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today". The persistence of the dispute says less about the evidence than it does about how reluctant later readers were to accept that an eighteen-year-old woman had conceived, in a single sleepless night, one of the most consequential ideas in literary history.

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• 6. Years in Italy

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  On the 12th of March 1818, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont left England for Italy with no intention of returning. Their first task on arriving was to hand Claire's daughter, first called Alba and later Allegra, to Byron, who had agreed to raise her on the condition that Claire have nothing more to do with her. What followed were years of restless movement through Rome, Venice, Naples, and other Italian cities, circled by grief. Clara, their daughter, died in September 1818 in Venice. William, their son, died in June 1819 in Rome, of malaria. Percy wrote in his notebook at the time: "My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone, / And left me in this dreary world alone?" On the 12th of November 1819, Mary gave birth to a fourth child, Percy Florence, who would be her only child to survive to adulthood. Despite the losses, these were years of intense intellectual output for both Shelleys. Mary wrote the novella that became Matilda, the historical novel Valperga, and the plays Proserpine and Midas during this period. Valperga was written partly to help relieve her father's financial difficulties after Percy refused to assist him further. In Naples, in December 1818, they received only a single visitor during a three-month stay: a physician. And in the summer of 1822, at the Villa Magni near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici, on the 16th of June, Mary miscarried and came close to death. Percy sat her in a bath of ice to stop the bleeding; the doctor later told him the action had saved her life.

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• 7. Widowhood and the Writing Life

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  On the 8th of July 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and an eighteen-year-old boat boy named Charles Vivian sailed south from Lerici to Livorno, where Percy met with Byron and Leigh Hunt to discuss launching a radical magazine called The Liberal. They set out on the return journey that same day and never reached their destination. Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed ashore near Viareggio. Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley's body on the beach. Mary Shelley lived for a year afterward with Leigh Hunt's family in Genoa, transcribing Byron's poems, and then returned to England on the 23rd of July 1823. Her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, agreed to support her son Percy Florence only if the boy were surrendered to a guardian Mary did not choose. She refused, and eventually wrested a limited annual allowance of £100 from him, rising later to £250, which she would have to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate. Sir Timothy refused ever to meet her in person and communicated only through lawyers. He also threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of Percy were published. Mary found a way around that: she wrote biographical notes into her editions of Percy's poetry, turning the notes themselves into a record of his life. On the 29th of August 1823, she attended a performance of Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, the first stage adaptation of her novel, at the English Opera House in the West End. Its popularity drove a second printing of Frankenstein and a wave of further theatrical versions. In 1830, she sold the copyright to a new edition of Frankenstein for £60 to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their Standard Novels series.

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• 8. Legacy Reconstructed

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  Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known principally as Percy's widow and as the author of Frankenstein. In the introduction to her letters published in 1945, editor Frederick Jones wrote that the collection could not be justified "by the general quality of the letters or by Mary Shelley's importance as a writer", but only by her identity as Percy's wife. That judgment had still not fully shifted by 1980, when Betty T. Bennett published the first volume of Mary Shelley's complete letters and noted that scholars had long treated her as "a result: William Godwin's and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter who became Shelley's Pygmalion." It was not until Emily Sunstein's 1989 biography, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, that a full scholarly life appeared in print. What subsequent scholars found was a body of work far broader than Frankenstein: the historical novels Valperga in 1823 and Perkin Warbeck in 1830; the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826; Lodore in 1835 and Falkner in 1837; the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1844; and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, published between 1829 and 1846, whose Lives volumes had a print run of about 4,000 copies each. Those Lives, republished only in 2002, revealed what literary scholar Greg Kucich called her "prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages" and her interest in what he termed "emerging forms of feminist historiography". On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, her son and daughter-in-law opened her writing desk and found inside it locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy, and a copy of his poem Adonais, one page folded around a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.

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