Mary Shelley

About this figure

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was born in London, the daughter of two well-known radical writers, the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever eleven days after the birth, so Mary never knew her mother except through her books, which Godwin encouraged her to read as she grew up in his household among the writers, philosophers, and political dissenters who visited him.

In 1814, at sixteen, she began a relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was twenty-one, already married, and a follower of her father's political ideas. That summer the two of them, along with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, left England together for the Continent, an elopement that scandalized both families. Two years later, in the summer of 1816, the party traveled to Geneva and took a house near Lord Byron's rented villa, Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva; also present was Byron's physician, John William Polidori. Confined indoors for days by unusually bad weather, the group read German ghost stories aloud, and Byron proposed that each of them write one of their own. Mary Shelley's contribution grew into Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in January 1818 when she was twenty. Her name was not attached to it until a revised edition appeared in 1831; questions about how much her husband had shaped the text in editing were still being argued by scholars well over a century later.

Her private life in these years was marked by repeated loss. A daughter born in 1815 died within weeks. In December 1816, Percy's first wife, Harriet, was found drowned in London; Mary and Percy married later that same month. The family settled in Italy in 1818, where two more of Mary's children, Clara and William, died in infancy within about a year of each other; only one child, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood. In July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank in a storm off the Italian coast near Viareggio. Mary Shelley, twenty-four and widowed, returned to England the following year and supported herself and her son by writing for the rest of her life, at times against the wishes of Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, who controlled the family estate and disapproved of anything that drew public attention to his son's memory.

Alongside Frankenstein, she published the historical novel Valperga (1823), set in medieval Italy around the career of the condottiero Castruccio Castracani, and The Last Man (1826), which imagines a plague that destroys nearly all of humanity and includes characters drawn recognizably from Byron and from Percy Shelley himself. A shorter novella, Mathilda, written around 1819 and dealing frankly with a father's disturbing love for his daughter, was thought too dangerous to publish; her own father advised against it, and the manuscript remained unpublished until a scholarly edition finally appeared in 1959. In her later years she also edited and annotated her husband's poetry for publication, doing much to build the reputation he has held ever since. She died in London on February 1, 1851, at fifty-three; her physician believed the cause was a brain tumor.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.