She was just 19 when she wrote her classic horror novel during a rainy, claustrophobic summer in Switzerland in 1816. But what Mary Godwin Shelley created in her half-dead monster Frankenstein would haunt reader’s imaginations for centuries to come.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London in 1797. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an outspoken feminist writer and philosopher whose writings advocated for women’s rights and free love. She died just a few days after her daughter was born, of a fever brought on during childbirth.
As a tribute to his wife, William Godwin, Mary’s father, published Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a collection of Mary’s mother’s writings that was meant to delineate her political and literary views. Instead, the book brought scandal to the family, with Mary confessing her extramarital affairs in defense of women’s rights. She also admitted to having an illegitimate older daughter, Mary’s half-sister. (William Godwin was fine with all this, by the way.)
Mary grew up reading and embracing her mother’s work, part of an informal yet classical education that her father oversaw for Mary and her step-sister Claire, the daughter of William Godwin’s second wife. He and the new Mrs. Godwin opened a publishing house, which never turned a profit but which drew writers and intellectuals (and potential investors) into their circle. The influence of these political and literary thinkers helped to guide Mary’s education.
Percy Bysse Shelley was one of her father’s admirers. He was a young, radical poet from a wealthy aristocratic family who, when he met Mary in 1814, had promised to help bail out William Godwin’s business. His family, however, rejected Percy’s radical and unconventional ideas (especially his advocating using wealth to alleviate poverty and remedy society’s injustices) and cut him off from his inheritance.
The love affair between Percy and Mary is one of romantic, gothic legend. They first began meeting, against her father’s wishes (Percy was married at the time), at her mother’s gravesite, then ran away just three months after their first introduction. (Mary was 16, Percy was 21.) They left for France with Mary’s stepsister Claire, just ahead of creditors and Percy’s pregnant first wife.
The couple ran out of money and returned to London, renting a garret room so they could continue to write, read and entertain the radical poet class. Now pregnant herself, Mary tried to reconcile with her father but he refused to help the couple. About the same time, Mary found out that Percy was having an affair with Claire (free love, remember?) and that his first wife had given birth to his son.
It was late 1814, she was 17 and pregnant, and Mary was none too pleased with her situation. But she loved Percy and, lacking resources, decided to stay with him.
In February 1815, Mary gave birth to their daughter, but the baby died a few weeks later, sending Mary into a deep depression. By summer she was pregnant again, and Percy had inherited a little money from his grandfather; their son William was born in January 1816, and that summer the family traveled to Geneva Switzerland to stay with the poet Lord Byron, by whom Claire was pregnant after a brief affair.
It was here that Mary wrote her gothic horror novel. In between days spent boating on Lake Geneva, reading philosophy and languishing over boozy, drug-addled dinners, Lord Byron challenged his visitors to each come up with a ghost story. In her letters, Mary claims to have been inspired by galvanism, a late 18th century term for using electricity to animate lifeless biological matter (like frogs, or possibly a corpse).
Accepting the challenge, Mary claims to have had dreams of a man kneeling over a human form he had cobbled together, and a machine that would “mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world”. This became the basis of what she thought would be a short story, but which became, at her husband’s encouragement, her first novel: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It was published anonymously in January of 1818; for years, people assumed Percy had written it.
The group returned to England in the fall of 1816. In December, Percy’s first wife killed herself, and he and Mary fought for custody of his two children with her. To improve their chances, he and Mary (who was pregnant again) got married, which resolved her differences with her father. (Percy was later declared unfit and the children were placed with another family.)
In September of 1817, Mary had her third child, a daughter, and the following March, on the run from creditors, the family (with Claire and children in tow) left for Italy.
Italy was a creative haven for this literary class, which enjoyed political and social freedoms that England didn’t have. Mary and Percy toured the country, staying with friends, other poets and writers. Mary wrote two plays and two novels, but tragedy struck when first their daughter and then their son died within a year, sending Mary into a deep depression. In November of 1819 her fourth child, Percy Florence, was born; he would be she and Percy’s only living child.
In 1822, the Shelley family settled in a villa on the coast of the Italian Riviera. That July, Percy died in a sailing accident; Mary stayed in Italy for another year but returned to England when money ran out. She fought Percy’s family for child support, which she received despite the family’s strong disapproval of their relationship. She spent the next decade writing and publishing her own work, as well as Percy’s poetry and the travel diaries they had kept.
Mary and her son Percy would be close for the rest of her life. They often traveled together, and after he married in 1848 she moved in with Percy and her new daughter in law. She continued to write, but her health deteriorated significantly. Plagued by headaches and temporary paralysis, Mary died on Feb. 1, 1835 of a brain tumor. She was 53 years old.
Since it’s Halloween week and all, here’s a fascinating profile written for the New Yorker by Jill Lepore on the bicentennial of the writing of Frankenstein. It’ll give you insight and chills, perfect for a rainy fall day.