Biography

Biography

Born: August 30, 1797
London, England
Died: February 1, 1851
Bournemouth, England
English novelist

English novelist Mary Shelley is best known for writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and for her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

Early years

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist (one who works on behalf of women's rights) and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, the political writer and novelist, both of whom objected to the institution of marriage. Ten days after Mary's birth, Wollstonecraft died from complications, leaving Godwin, a self-absorbed intellectual, to care for 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 neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, who already had two children of her own. The new Mrs. Godwin favored her own children over the daughters of the celebrated Wollstonecraft, and Mary was often 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 favorite 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).

Life with Shelley

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, twenty-two, was married, and 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 they spent the next few years traveling in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, cut off his son's large allowance after the couple ran away together.

In 1816 Mary's half-sister Fanny committed suicide; weeks later, Percy's wife, Harriet, drowned herself. Mary and Percy were 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 depression 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 formed 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.

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