Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, on 30 August 1797, into a household of radical thought and literary ambition. Her father was William Godwin, the political philosopher, novelist, and journalist; her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher, educator, writer, and advocate of women’s rights. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever 11 days after Mary’s birth, leaving Godwin to raise Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay. Mary grew up reading her mother’s books and Godwin’s memoir of Wollstonecraft, and she was taught to cherish her mother’s memory.

Though she received little formal schooling, Shelley had an unusually broad education for a girl of her time. Godwin tutored her across many subjects, took the children on educational outings, and gave them access to his library and to the thinkers who visited the household, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Aaron Burr. At 15, her father described her as “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind,” with a great desire for knowledge. She also spent time with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter near Dundee, Scotland, where she enjoyed the open surroundings and companionship of Baxter’s daughters.

Her youth was also marked by strain. When Mary was four, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated neighbour with two children of her own, Charles and Claire. Mary came to detest her stepmother, and the Godwin household was often troubled by debt. In 1814, Mary began a romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of her father’s political followers, who was already married. Mary, Percy, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont left for France and travelled through Europe. On returning to England, Mary was pregnant. The next two years brought ostracism, constant debt, and the death of her prematurely born daughter. Mary and Percy married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy’s wife, Harriet.

Shelley is best known for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the Gothic novel published in 1818 and considered an early example of science fiction. She conceived the idea in the summer of 1816, when she and Percy, with Claire Clairmont, spent time near Geneva, Switzerland, with Lord Byron and John William Polidori. The Shelleys left Britain for Italy in 1818. There, their second and third children died before Mary gave birth to Percy Florence Shelley, her last and only surviving child. In 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary returned to England and devoted herself to raising her son and to life as a professional author.

For many years, Shelley was known mainly for Frankenstein and for editing and promoting her husband’s writings. Later scholarship has given a fuller account of her own body of work. Her novels include the historical works Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). She also wrote the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia between 1829 and 1846.

Shelley’s writing often argues that cooperation and sympathy, especially as practised by women in the family, are ways to reform civil society. That view challenged both Percy Shelley’s individualistic Romantic ethos and the Enlightenment political theories set out by William Godwin. Her last decade was marked by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour that killed her on 1 February 1851, at the age of 53. Yet her work still draws readers because it joins bold invention with moral pressure: a mind trained by radical books, family loss, exile, debt, and care, asking what human beings owe to one another.