Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

(1797-1851)

Read more about Shelley at The Gale Group's Literature Resource Center

Biography

SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN (August 30, 1797-February 1, 1851), novelist, caused by her birth the death of a mother far more illustrious than she ever became. She was the daughter and only child of the radical philosopher William Godwin and the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who legitimized her by their marriage five months before her birth.

The younger Mary grew up in a strange household--a hollow, pompous philosopher of a father, always poor and in debt and pouring forth unreadable books; a shrill termagant of a stepmother who hated her for her mother's sake; a negligible stepbrother and half-brother; a stepsister who was a difficult companion because of her hysterical flightiness, and a melancholy illegitimate half-sister doomed to suicide. If Mary Godwin ever had any formal schooling, it does not appear in the record of her life. But she lived for her first twenty-five years in an atmosphere of learning and scholarship, even when she was making long visits to relatives in Scotland, and her good, clear mind absorbed that atmosphere and fixed her in habits of study. She was an eager though not completely understanding disciple of her father's religious and political radicalism. The other great influence on her youth was her dead mother; convinced that she was Mary Wollstonecraft's innocent murderer, she spent much time reading by the tomb in St. Pancras Cemetery, communing in thought with the woman who lay there.

When this girl at sixteen met the twenty-one-year-old Shelley, already an unhappy husband and father, incandescent with his genius and his young passion for perfection, it was inevitable that they should strike fire on flint. They ran away together--with Mary's stepsister (the second Mrs. Godwin's daughter by her first marriage), Claire Clairmont, for company--a month before Mary's seventeenth birthday. Godwin was furious, disowned them both--and continued to bleed Shelley for money. Their first child died in infancy. Harriet Shelley killed herself, a few months after the suicide of poor Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft's other daughter, her illegitimate child by the American Gilbert Imlay. At the end of 1816 Mary Godwin and Shelley were finally able to marry. Early in 1817 they settled at Marlow, with their surviving children, the year-old William, always his mother's darling, and the new baby Clara, who was to live hardly more than a year.

After Shelley was refused custody of his two children by Harriet, he feared to lose those by Mary also, and decided to leave England permanently. This they did in March 1818. Claire Clairmont went with them, and stayed till 1821. After moving about for a time from city to city, they settled for the most part at Pisa, until in the spring of 1822 they took the house near Lerici which was to be Shelley's last home. It was in their first Italian days, in company with Byron, that Frankenstein, immeasurably the best of Mary Shelley's novels, was written.

Clara died in the autumn of 1818. In the following June came a far worse blow; their best-beloved child, little William, who could walk and talk, died suddenly after an illness of only a few days. Mary was desolate; her grief combined with worry over her father's misfortunes to plunge her into actual melancholy. The birth of their last and only surviving child, Percy Florence, at the end of 1819 did little to alleviate her sorrow. Nor did it make things easier that the next year witnessed Shelley's idealizing but disturbing passion for Emilia Viviani; Mary indulged in a burst of quite ordinary jealousy which was as futile as it was harrowing.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia. In a sense, though Mary lived for nearly thirty years after, and did the bulk of her literary work, her life was over. Their union had not been entirely happy: Mary was cold and often impatient; she was an intellectual but otherwise not extraordinary woman, married to a man unlike any other on earth. She had loved him to the depths of her being, and mingled with her grief was that worst of all remorse, remorse for failure in relations with the dead. She was dedicated thenceforth to his memory and to the care of their son. Trelawny, John Howard Payne, and perhaps Washington Irving, wanted to marry her, but she refused them all. "I want to be Mary Shelley on my tombstone," she said.

Trelawny took her back to London in 1823. Shelley's father offered to care for the child, but only on condition of her giving him up; she refused and slaved at hack writing jobs to supplement the miserly allowance he granted her, and to rear Percy as a gentleman's son. (That is all he became--a strange fate for the child of Shelley.) In 1826 Charles Shelley, Harriet's son, died, and Percy became the direct heir to the baronetcy, to which he succeeded on his grandfather's death. Mary sent him to Harrow and Cambridge--a sufficient commentary on her memories of Shelley's accounts of his bitter days at Eton and Oxford. When young Percy was twenty-one, and had been graduated from Cambridge, Sir Timothy Shelley increased his allowance to L 400 a year; the old man did not die until 1844. William Godwin had died in 1836.

In 1838 the restrictions on editing Shelley's literary remains had been lifted, and Mary toiled at them for two years. Her health had been ruined by long and exhausting labor. With finances a little easier, she and her son traveled frequently on the continent between 1840 and 1843. After her father-in-law's death she was free at last to fulfill her great ambition of writing her husband's biography. But she no longer had the physical strength for such a task; only a fragment was completed. She grew increasingly an invalid until at the beginning of 1851, an old woman at fifty-three, she died. Her son had her buried at Bournemouth, and later removed the bodies of her parents from St. Pancras, to lie beside hers.

There was too much of her father in Mary Shelley to make her completely a sympathetic character. She looked like him, with pale skin, high forehead, and penetrating grey eyes; and she had his positive nature, his lack of sensibility. But she also had her mother's incisive mind, her high standard of duty and responsibility. What was deep in her emotionally was burnt away on the funeral pyre on the sands of Viareggio, except for what survived in her devotion to her son. Hers was the most quietly tragic of all existences--the life that outlasts its reason for being.

Frankenstein is Mary Shelley's only permanent contribution to literature. (The rest of her novels were written for bread, though there is a certain reminiscent strength in Lodore.) The production of that masterpiece of horror by a girl of twenty-one seems so incredible that someone has suggested that association with Shelley and Byron temporarily possessed her with their power! As a matter of fact, it is youth which revels in horror, and Frankenstein is therefore essentially a youthful book. In its genre it has never been surpassed.

(M. A. deF.)