Mary Shelley: the story on HearLore

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on the 30th of August 1797, but her life began in the shadow of a tragedy that would define her entire existence. Her mother, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever just eleven days after giving birth to her. This was not a quiet death; it was a public scandal that would follow the child into adulthood. Her father, William Godwin, published a memoir of his wife that revealed her affairs and illegitimate child, intending it as a tribute but creating a source of shame for his daughter. Mary grew up reading these memoirs and her mother's books, raised to cherish a memory that was simultaneously celebrated and vilified. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher and the first child of the political philosopher, but she was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her father, left to raise her along with her older half-sister Fanny Imlay, struggled with debt and social ostracism. By 1801, he had married Mary Jane Clairmont, a woman with two children of her own, creating a household where Mary felt increasingly isolated. The stepmother, described by Godwin's friends as quick-tempered and quarrelsome, became the object of Mary's detestation, a relationship that would color her early years. Despite the domestic turmoil, Mary received an unusual education for a girl of her time. Her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects, taking her on educational outings and granting her access to his library and the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. She attended a boarding school in Ramsgate for six months in 1811, but her true education came from the radical political theories she absorbed from her father's circle. By the age of fifteen, her father described her as singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind, with a desire for knowledge that was great and a perseverance that was almost invincible. This intellectual foundation would soon be tested by a romance that would upend her life and launch her into the literary history books.

The Elopement That Shattered A Family

On the 26th of June 1814, Mary Godwin declared her love for Percy Bysshe Shelley at her mother's graveside in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-one, and their union was a secret that would eventually destroy her relationship with her father. Percy Shelley, a radical poet-philosopher who had been estranged from his wealthy aristocratic family, had begun visiting William Godwin to help him out of debt. However, after months of promises, Shelley announced that he could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts, leaving the philosopher angry and betrayed. Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother's grave, and they fell in love, with tradition claiming that Mary lost her virginity to Shelley in the churchyard. When her father disapproved and tried to thwart the relationship, the couple eloped on the 28th of July 1814, secretly leaving for France with Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. They traveled through a France recently ravaged by war, using donkeys, mules, carriages, and their own feet to reach Switzerland. The journey was a novel in itself, a romantic adventure that left them penniless and pregnant. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child, and the situation awaiting her was fraught with complications. Her father refused to have anything to do with her, and the couple moved into lodgings at Somers Town, where they maintained an intense program of reading and writing. They entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock, but the couple's life was marked by constant debt and the threat of debtor's prison. Mary's father, who had been saved from debtor's prison by philosophical devotees, now cast her out, leaving her to face the consequences of her choices alone. The couple's distraught letters reveal their pain at these separations, and Mary's journal entries from the time show her struggle to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley and his constant outings with Claire Clairmont. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Percy and Claire were almost certainly lovers, which caused much jealousy on Mary's part. Despite the turmoil, Mary and Percy continued their own writing, and she began to conceive again, recovering from the acute depression that had been induced by the loss of her premature baby girl, who died on the 6th of March 1815.

When was Mary Shelley born and who was her mother?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on the 30th of August 1797. Her mother was the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of puerperal fever eleven days after giving birth to her.

When did Mary Shelley elope with Percy Bysshe Shelley and where did they go?

Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley eloped on the 28th of July 1814. They secretly left for France and traveled through war-ravaged regions to reach Switzerland.

When and where did Mary Shelley conceive the idea for Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein between 2am and 3am on the 16th of June 1816 at Lord Byron's villa in Geneva. This occurred during a summer of storms caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora.

When did Mary Shelley marry Percy Bysshe Shelley and why was the marriage necessary?

Mary Shelley married Percy Bysshe Shelley on the 30th of December 1816 at St Mildred's Church in London. The marriage was necessary because Percy Shelley's lawyers advised him to improve his case to assume custody of his children from his first wife, Harriet Shelley.

When did Mary Shelley die and where was she buried?

Mary Shelley died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square in London. She was buried at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth near her son's home at Boscombe.

The Summer That Changed Literature

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son traveled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont, planning to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron. The party arrived in Geneva on the 14th of May, and Byron joined them on the 25th of May, bringing his young physician, John William Polidori. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night. It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined them for days to the house. The violent storms were, it is now known, a repercussion of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in the previous year. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they each write a ghost story. Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious, forced to reply with a mortifying negative each morning. During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated, Mary noted; galvanism had given token of such things. It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her waking dream. She began writing what she assumed would be a short story, but with Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalized several times and has formed the basis for a number of films. In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place between 2am and 3am on the 16th of June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story. This summer in Switzerland was the moment when Mary first stepped out from childhood into life, and it was the birth of a literary masterpiece that would define her legacy. The novel, which is considered an early example of science fiction, was published anonymously, and reviewers and readers assumed that Percy Shelley was the author, since the book was published with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin. The extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics, but Mary Shelley wrote that she certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to her husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.

The Tragedy That Followed Her

On the 10th of December 1816, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London. Both suicides were hushed up, and Harriet's family obstructed Percy Shelley's efforts, fully supported by Mary Godwin, to assume custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying, so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on the 30th of December 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London. Her father gave consent to her marriage as required for a minor aged under twenty-one, and Mr and Mrs Godwin were present as witnesses who signed the register, the marriage ending the family rift. Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on the 13th of January, at first called Alba, later Allegra. In March of that year, the Chancery Court ruled Percy Shelley morally unfit to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family. Also in March, the Shelleys moved with Claire and Alba to Albion House at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames. There Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on the 2nd of September. The couple's decision to leave England for Italy on the 12th of March 1818 was driven by the threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children. They had no intention of returning, and the Italian adventure was blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children. Clara died of dysentery at the age of one in September 1818 in Venice, and William died of malaria at three and a half in June 1819 in Rome. These losses left her in a deep depression that isolated her from Percy Shelley, who wrote in his notebook: My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone, And left me in this dreary world alone? Thy form is here indeed, a lovely one, But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode. For a time, Mary Shelley found comfort only in her writing. The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on the 12th of November 1819, finally lifted her spirits, though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life. Italy became for Mary Shelley a country which memory painted as paradise, despite its associations with personal loss. Their Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys, but the coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their perfect plaything for the summer, a new sailing boat. On the 8th of July 1822, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boat boy, Charles Vivian. They never reached their destination. A letter arrived at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated the 8th of July, saying, pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious. Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed up on the coast near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici. Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley's corpse on the beach at Viareggio, leaving Mary to face the world alone.

The Woman Who Built A Legacy

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On the 23rd of July 1823, she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby. Sir Timothy Shelley had at first agreed to support his grandson, Percy Florence, only if he were handed over to an appointed guardian. Mary Shelley rejected this idea instantly. She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited annual allowance, which she had to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate, but to the end of his days, he refused to meet her in person and dealt with her only through lawyers. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavors, but concern for her son restricted her options. Sir Timothy threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of the poet were published. In 1826, Percy Florence became the legal heir of the Shelley estate after the death of his half-brother Charles Shelley, his father's son by Harriet Shelley. Sir Timothy raised Mary's allowance from £100 a year to £250 but remained as difficult as ever. Mary Shelley enjoyed the stimulating society of William Godwin's circle, but poverty prevented her from socializing as she wished. She also felt ostracized by those who, like Sir Timothy, still disapproved of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1828, she fell ill with smallpox while visiting them in Paris, weeks later she recovered, unscarred but without her youthful beauty. During the period 1827 to 1840, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer. She wrote the novels The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Lodore in 1835, and Falkner in 1837. She contributed five volumes of Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French authors to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines. She was still helping to support her father, and they looked out for publishers for each other. In 1830, she sold the copyright for a new edition of Frankenstein for £60 to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their new Standard Novels series. After her father's death in 1836 at the age of eighty, she began assembling his letters and a memoir for publication, as he had requested in his will, but after two years of work, she abandoned the project. Throughout this period, she also championed Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. By 1837, Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired. In the summer of 1838 Edward Moxon, the publisher of Tennyson and the son-in-law of Charles Lamb, proposed publishing an edition of the collected works of Percy Shelley. Mary wanted to include in this collection an unexpurgated version of Percy Shelley's epic poem Queen Mab. Moxon wanted to leave out the most radical passages as too shocking and atheistical, but Mary prevailed, thanks to Harriet de Boinville, who agreed to Mary's request to borrow her own original copy gifted by Percy Shelley. Mary was paid £500 to edit the Poetical Works in 1838, which Sir Timothy insisted should not include a biography. Mary found a way to tell the story of Percy's life, nonetheless: she included extensive biographical notes about the poems.

The Final Years And The Death That Came

In 1840 and 1842, mother and son traveled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, published in 1844. In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, falling from the stalk like an overblown flower, as Mary put it. For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped. In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. In 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. A friend of her son bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Shortly afterwards, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also in 1845, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary Shelley refused. In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and accompanied them on travels abroad. Mary Shelley's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On the 1st of February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumor. According to Jane Shelley, Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father, but Percy and Jane, judging the graveyard at St Pancras to be dreadful, chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart. Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga in 1823 and Perkin Warbeck in 1830, the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826 and her final two novels, Lodore in 1835 and Falkner in 1837. Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1844 and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia from 1829 to 1846, support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.