Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (born August 30, 1797, London, England—died February 1, 1851, London) was an English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein (1818), a seminal work of Romanticism and a Gothic horror classic that is also considered to be one of the first science-fiction novels.

Early life and intellectual upbringing

She was the only daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from puerperal fever 11 days after her daughter’s birth. In 1801, when Mary Godwin was four, her father married Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought into the household her own two children, Charles and Jane (later “Claire”). (Mary Godwin also had a half sister, Fanny Imlay, who was born to Wollstonecraft in 1794.) Young Mary did not get along with her stepmother, who was jealous of her stepdaughter. Increasingly, Mary was displaced in the family, especially after the birth of her father and stepmother’s son, William, in 1803.

Although she did not receive a formal education, Godwin grew up in an intellectual atmosphere surrounded by many leading writers and thinkers who admired her father and visited him at home. At age 11 she published a children’s tale, Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris, through her father’s publishing house. In the summer of 1812 she was sent to Dundee, Scotland, to live with an acquaintance of her father, purportedly for her health but more likely because of disagreements between Mary and her stepmother. Ultimately, she spent two happy years in Scotland. She later wrote of these years and of her home there,

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They were the eyry of freedom.…It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.

Relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most scholars think the first meeting between Mary Godwin and the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley took place in November 1812, during one of her visits home. Others think she did not meet him until 1814. Regardless of the year, Shelley had not yet composed the poems that would make him one of the most renowned figures of the second generation of English Romantics. But he had already established himself as a rebel, having been expelled from the University of Oxford in 1811 for refusing to admit his authorship of a pamphlet endorsing atheism. Later that year he had eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook (Shelley was 19), a tavern owner’s daughter, which incensed his aristocratic father and grandfather.

Indeed, Shelley was married when he met Godwin. Moreover, he and Harriet became the parents of a daughter born in 1813, and they were expecting their second child in late 1814. Nonetheless, Godwin eloped with him to France in July 1814, and she quickly became pregnant. Their child, a daughter named Clara, died within days of her birth in February 1815. Godwin’s elopement caused a rift with her father, and two years passed before she saw him again.

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The “haunted summer” of 1816 and the seeds of Frankenstein

In January 1816 Godwin gave birth to a son, William. In May she, Percy Shelley, their son, and Claire Clairmont went to Switzerland to meet with the poet Lord Byron, who was engaged in an extramarital affair with Clairmont. That summer was unusually cold and stormy, perhaps as a result of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia, and came to be known as the “year without a summer”—or, in English literature and popular culture, the “haunted summer.” It was especially fruitful for the writers who were frequent guests at Villa Diodati, a mansion in Cologny (near Geneva) that Byron had leased. There he challenged his guests to a ghost story contest, which proved to be the genesis for Godwin’s soon-to-be masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Primarily inspired by an 1812 French translation of the German ghost story collection Fantasmagoriana, a waking nightmare in which Godwin conjured a student horrified by his vivification of assembled human body parts, and an earlier dream in which she coaxed her daughter Clara back to life, Godwin began crafting a tale about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who artificially creates a human being that ultimately brings tragedy to his life. As she worked on her own story, her husband wrote the poems “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Byron and fellow guest John Polidori also produced works that would be important to their careers, including a vampire tale that laid the groundwork for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). More than mere literary diversions, these poems and stories became significant works of Romanticism, and Godwin and Polidori’s writings introduced two of the most enduring characters in horror fiction.

(Learn more about the events of the “Haunted Summer of 1816.”)

In September 1816 Godwin and Shelley returned to England, and the couple were married on December 30, 1816. Their legal union took place not long after Godwin’s half sister, Fanny Imlay, and Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Shelley, had died by suicide, in October and December, respectively.

Meanwhile, Mary Shelley continued to work on her novel, adding material written after a visit to the Swiss Alps in July 1816. In September 1817 she gave birth to another daughter, Clara Everina, who soon died of dysentery. Later that year she coauthored a travel book, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, which recounts the continental tour she and Percy took in 1814 following their elopement and then chronicles their summer near Geneva in 1816.

Publishing Frankenstein

In January 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel, the story draws from many ideas associated with the Romantic era, such as the primacy of nature, emotion, and the sublime. Victor Frankenstein’s creation, for example, fits the archetype of the “noble savage,” a Romantic convention with roots in ancient Greek literature that portrays an inherent good nature in uncivilized characters. The monster begins life as innocent as a child but is quickly corrupted by the violence in society. Frankenstein also debates beliefs of the Enlightenment era, especially the emphasis on science, reason, and the pursuit of knowledge. Notably, it is Frankenstein’s unrestrained appetite for progress that ultimately results in his own destruction.

Five hundred copies of the book were printed anonymously on the cheapest paper available by a largely unknown London publisher. Only 20 years old, Shelley did not immediately claim authorship because of the novel’s controversial contents. However, the work quickly exploded in popularity, and by August a family friend of the Shelleys was telling them that Frankenstein “seems to be universally read.”

The original edition included a preface written by Percy and a dedication to William Godwin, which led many to believe that one of those men was the author. Although Percy did have some influence on the novel—notably, he altered some of his wife’s word choices, swapping her more accessible language for ornate, Latinate words and sentence structures—Mary’s manuscripts definitively prove that she was the novel’s creator.

In 1831 she published a third edition of Frankenstein, which included extensive edits to the original edition and an introduction describing her inspirations.

Later life and other works

However, Shelley continued to suffer tragedy. In June 1819 her three-year-old son, William, died from malaria while the Shelleys were living in Italy. Several months later she gave birth to another son, Percy Florence, who would be her only child to survive into adulthood. In 1822 her husband and their friend Edward Williams drowned when their boat sank in a summer storm while sailing to Lerici, Italy. Percy Bysshe Shelley was 29.

(What piece of her husband’s body did Mary Shelley keep after he died?)

After her husband’s death, Shelley returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing his writings and to educating their son. She published her late husband’s Posthumous Poems (1824). She also edited his Poetical Works (1839), with long and invaluable notes, and his prose works. Her Journal is a rich source of Shelley biography, and her letters are an indispensable adjunct.

She also continued to follow her own muse, writing several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work.

Death and legacy

Mary Shelley died at age 53 from what is believed to have been a belatedly diagnosed brain tumor. Frankenstein’s subsequent influence on literature and popular culture cannot be overstated. In 2016 alone nearly 50,000 copies of the novel were sold—100 times the number of copies produced in its first printing. One of the original copies sold at auction in 2021 for $1.17 million, breaking the record for a printed work by a woman. And of course, Frankenstein’s man-made monster inspired a similar creature in numerous American horror films; the work continued to be revisited in film, theater, television, and literary adaptations into the 21st century.

Posthumous publications of her casual writings include The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844 (1987), edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, and Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1995), edited by Betty T. Bennett. Among the many tributes to her is the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley scholarship, an annual award given to women horror writers.

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