Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (née Godwin) was an English novelist, playwright, essayist, and biographer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary was born in London, England, into the family of the famous feminist, teacher, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally famous liberal philosopher, anarchist journalist, and atheist William Godwin. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father, left to care for Mary and her half-sister Fanny Imlay, soon remarried his neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont. Under his guidance, Mary received an excellent education, which was rare for girls of that time.

She met Percy Shelley, as freethinking and radical as her father, when Percy and his first wife, Harriet, visited the Godwins’ home and bookshop in London. Percy was unhappy in his marriage and began visiting the Godwins more often (and alone). In the summer of 1814, he and Mary, who was then only 16, fell in love. They ran away to France together with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. This was the poet’s second elopement, as he had already run away with Harriet three years earlier. Returning a few weeks later, the young couple was shocked that Godwin refused to see them, although Mary was already pregnant by that time.

Mary found comfort in her work and in Percy, who became, despite disappointment and tragedy, the love of her life. Percy was also more than satisfied with his companion in the early years. He delighted in the fact that Mary could “feel poetry and understand philosophy” — although she, like Harriet before her, refused his proposal that she share him with his friend Thomas Hogg. Thus Mary came to understand that Percy’s devotion to the ideals of free love would always conflict with his inner longing for “true love,” about which he wrote in many of his poems.

The young couple, however, could only marry in late 1816, after Percy’s first wife, Harriet, died by suicide.

In 1816, the couple