MARY SHELLEY Biography: Mary Wollstonecraft

MARY SHELLEY

Biography:

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in Somers Town, London, England. She was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist (one who works on behalf of women's rights) an author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, and William Godwin, the political writer, essayist and novelist. Both of them objected to the institution of marriage. Ten days after Mary's birth, Wollstonecraft died from complications, leaving Godwin, a self-absorbed intellectual, to take care of both Mary and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's daughter from an earlier relationship.

Mary's home life improved little, when four years later her father married his next-door neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, who already had two children. Godwin provided his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his liberal political theories.  The new Mrs Godwin favoured her own children over the daughters of the well-known Wollstonecraft, and Mary was often left alone and unhappy. She was not formally educated, but she read many of her mother's books, and absorbed the intellectual atmosphere created by her father and such visitors as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Young Mary's favourite retreat was Wollstonecraft's grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, where she went to read and write, and eventually, to meet her lover, Percy Shelley (1792–1822). It is in 1814 that Mary Godwin began a romantic relationship with one of her father’s political followers, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley.

As an admirer of Godwin, Percy Shelley visited the author's home and briefly met Mary when she was fourteen, but their attraction did not take hold until a meeting two years later. Shelley was twenty-two and married; his wife was expecting their second child, but he and Mary, like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart were more important than legal ones. In July 1814, one month before her seventeenth birthday, Mary ran away with Percy, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, but leaving Percy's pregnant wife behind. They left for France and travelled through Europe. Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, cut off his son's large allowance after the couple ran away together.  In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child.  In 1816 Mary's half-sister Fanny committed suicide; weeks later, Percy's wife, Harriet, drowned herself. Mary and Percy got married in London in an unsuccessful attempt to gain custody of his two children by Harriet. Three of their own children died soon after birth, and Mary fell into a deep nervous breakdown that did not improve even after the birth in 1819 of Percy Florence, her only surviving child. The Shelleys' marriage suffered, too, in the wake of their children's deaths, and Percy developed romantic attachments to other women.

Despite these difficult circumstances, Mary and Percy enjoyed a large group of friends, which included the poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) and the writer Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). They also maintained a schedule of very strict study—including classical and European literature, Greek, Latin, and Italian language, music and art—and other writing. During this period Mary completed Frankenstein, the story of a doctor who, while trying to discover the secret of life, steals bodies from graves in an attempt to create life from corpses’ parts—but instead creates a monster.

The Shelleys were settled near Lenci, Italy, in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned during a storm while sailing to meet Leigh Hunt and his wife. After a year in Italy, Mary returned to England forever with her son.

She died on February the 1st, 1851, at Belgravia, London, of a brain tumour. She rests besides her father, in St Peter’s Graveyard, Bournemouth, South Britain.

Frankenstein:

At only 18, she writes the novel Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, which will inspire the science fiction genre. She revisits the myth of the demiurge through the narrative eye of a scientist which has created a monstrous and inadaptated creature. Among her other works, are the novel Valperga (1823) or The Last Man (1826).

The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823.  This work redraws the terrible adventure of Victor Frankenstein (the scientist and not the creature), running away from the horrible creature to which he gave life to. Arrived at the North Pole, he gets acquainted of Captain Walton, and tells him his story. It is thus through his story that the reader relives the fate of a hideous creature, composed of various corpses’ parts. Abandoned and rejected, it is moved by a profound thirst of revenge and multiplies its crimes. Frankenstein already fixes the limits of human science, and the worries that result from it.

Mary Shelley’s work will be adapted many times, among which James Whale’s film (1931).

Quotations:

“Love is the only thing that sharing grows”

“Suffering erases up to the most primitives emotions of man”

“Only those who will have felt them, will be able to conceive the seductions of science".

Adélaïde Petit - 1L