Who was Mary Shelley?
Most of us think of Mary Shelley as the devoted wife of her late husband, Percy Shelley, who would patiently and methodically collect, organize and publish all of Percy’s writings for posterity – the Posthumous Poems in 1824, the Poetical Works in 1839, and most importantly the Essays, Letters from Abroad, and Translations in 1840 – that contained his ‘A Defence of Poetry’, and his translations of two of Plato’s dialogues – the Ion and the Banquet.
And so, Mary Shelley should be remembered for doing all this.
But we also should think of her as the author of numerous novels, of many short stories and reviews, and especially of that eerie masterpiece, her very first literary work – ‘Frankenstein’, that was published in 1818, when Mary was only 20 years old!
So, the first question we should ask, should be: how did a young 20-year-old woman come to write this classic psychological thriller called ‘Frankenstein’?
Mary did not know her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Mary.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in 1790 - a year before Thomas Paine wrote his ‘Rights of Man, being an answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution’’ in 1791; and she then wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects’ in 1792. She was quite the revolutionary!
Mary then went to Paris to learn of the events surrounding the French Revolution and she was witness to the execution of Louis XVI. In Paris, she associated with the Girondins, rather than the Jacobins – who followed Rousseau’s idea that women were the helpers of men.
Later she fell in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay (1754 – 1828) who had been a Lieutenant in the Continental Army, and was a diplomatic representative of the United States to France, and also a smuggler, helping to run the British blockade of French ports. Gilbert would claim that Mary was his wife (although they never married) to save her from the Terror and the attack on foreigners, and Mary would write ‘An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’ in 1794.
Imlay and Mary would return to England in 1795, and she would write a novel about her travels to Scandinavia in order to try to retrieve a stolen ship of Gilbert’s – ‘Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in 1796. Her relationship with Imlay ended, but then at a dinner to host Thomas Paine, she met William Godwin who later said of Mary’s ‘Letters’:
"If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration."
William and Mary would fall in love, and when Mary became pregnant, she and William were married in 1797 – even though he was opposed to marriage, but Mary died just 11 days after giving birth to Mary Godwin (Shelley). So, Godwin would raise and tutor Mary.
William Godwin was a controversial novelist and a political journalist who is best known for writing an ‘Enquiry Concerning Political Justice’ in 1793, while thinking about both Burke’s and Paine’s pamphlets. It was in response to Godwin’s book that Thomas Malthus wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers’ in 1798, that was written against Godwin’s ‘optimism’.
So, whatever can be said both for and against William Godwin, he, at least, was on the right side, and he put himself smack-dab in the middle of the fight.
In 1814, Percy Shelley began to visit his mentor, William Godwin, every day, and he soon fell in love with his daughter Mary Godwin, and they eloped.
After their son William was born in 1816, they left with Mary’s step-sister Claire who was having an affair with Byron, to meet Byron in Geneva. And it was here, during their four months stay in Geneva, that Mary Shelley began writing ‘Frankenstein’.
For those of you who may wish to watch the YouTube video of my presentation for the Rising Tide Foundation, on ‘Mary Shelley’s Fight Against Romanticism: A New Look at Dr. Frankenstein’, it can be watched here .