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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley née Godwin
(August 30, 1797 – February 1, 1851) was an English novelist who is
perhaps equally famous as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
and as the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
Biography
Shelley was born in London, England, the
second daughter of famed feminist, educator and writer Mary
Wollstonecraft and the equally famous liberal philosopher, anarchic
journalist and atheist dissenter, William Godwin. Her mother died at her
birth and her father, left to care for Mary and her older half-sister
Fanny Imlay, quickly married again. Under his tutelage, Mary received an
excellent education unusual for girls at the time.
She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a political
radical and free-thinker like her father, when Percy and his first wife
Harriet visited Godwin's home and bookshop in London. Percy, unhappy in
his marriage, began to visit Godwin more frequently (and alone). In the
summer of 1814 he and Mary (then only 16) fell in love. They eloped to
France on 27 July, with Mary's stepsister, Jane Clairmont, in tow. This
was the poet's second elopement, as he had also eloped with Harriet
three years before. Upon their return several weeks later, the young
couple were dismayed to find that Godwin, whose views on free love
apparently did not apply to his daughter, refused to see them.
Mary consoled herself with her studies and
with Percy, who would always be, despite disillusionment and tragedy,
the love of her life. Percy, too, was more than satisfied with his new
partner in these first years. He exulted that Mary was "one who can feel
poetry and understand philosophy" - although she, like Harriet before
her, refused his attempts to share her with his friend Thomas Hogg. Mary
thus learned that Percy's loyalty to Godwin's free love ideals would
always conflict with his deep desire for "true love" as expressed in so
much of his poetry.
Mary and Percy shared a love of languages
and literature. They enjoyed reading and discussing books together, such
as the classics that Percy took to reading upon their return to London
towards the end of the year. During this time Percy Shelley wrote "Alastor"
and "The Spirit of Solitude", in which he counsels against the loss of
"sweet human love" in exchange for the activism that he himself was to
promote and indulge in for much of his life.
During May of 1816, the couple, again with
Jane (now Claire) Clairmont, traveled to Lake Geneva to summer near the
famous and scandalous poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire
had left her both pregnant and somewhat obsessed with him. In terms of
English literature, it was to be a productive summer. Percy began work
on "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc". Mary, in the
meantime, was inspired to write an enduring masterpiece of her own.
Forced to stay indoors by the climatic
events of "The Year Without a Summer" on one particular evening, the
group of young writers and intellectuals decided to have a ghost-telling
contest. Another guest, Dr John Polidori, came up with The Vampyre,
later to become a strong influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Other
guests wove tales of equal horror, but Mary found herself unable to
invent one. That night, however, she had a waking dream where she saw
"the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had
put together." Then she set herself to put the story on paper. In time
it would be published as Frankenstein. Its success would endure long
after the other writings produced that summer had faded.
Mary had incorporated a number of different
sources into her work, not the least of which was the Promethean myth
from Ovid. The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the book the
'monster' finds in the cabin, is also clearly evident within the novel.
Also, both Shelleys had read William Beckford's Vathek (a Gothic novel
that has been likened to an Arabesque). Can one miss the darkling
reflection of the Beckford character's "insolent desire to "penetrate
the secrets of heaven" in both "Alastor" ("I have made my bed In
charnels and on coffins") and Mary's acclaimed piece ("Who shall
perceive the horrors ...as I dabbled among the unhallowed damp of the
grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay")?
Indeed, many, if not most, commentators take this "desire" to be a major
theme of Frankenstein.
Mary and Percy were both ethical
vegetarians and strong advocates for animals. One can see references to
vegetarianism in her writing. For example, in her novel Frankenstein,
the 'monster' was a vegetarian.
Returning to England in September of 1816,
Mary and Percy were stunned by two family suicides in quick succession.
In November, Mary's older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, left the Godwin home
and took her own life at a distant inn. Only weeks later, Percy's first
wife drowned herself in London's Hyde Park. Discarded and pregnant, she
had not welcomed Percy's invitation to join Mary and himself in their
new household.
On 30 December 1816, shortly after
Harriet's death, Percy and Mary were married, now with Godwin's
blessing. Their attempts to gain custody of Percy's two children by
Harriet failed, but their writing careers enjoyed more success when, in
the spring of 1817, Mary finished Frankenstein.
Over the following years, Mary's household
grew to include her own children by Percy, occasional friends, and
Claire's daughter by Byron. Shelley moved his menage from place to place
first in England and then in Italy. Mary suffered the death of her young
son Will in Rome, after which her infant daughter died, too, as Percy
moved the household yet again. By now Mary had resigned herself to her
husband's self-centered restlessness and his romantic enthusiasms for
other women. The birth of her only surviving child, Percy Florence
Shelley, consoled her somewhat for her losses.
Eventually the group settled in Lerici, a
town close to La Spezia in Italy, but it was an ill-fated choice. It was
here that Claire learned of her daughter's death at the Italian convent
to which Byron had sent her, and that Mary almost died of a miscarriage.
And it was from here, in July 1822, that Percy sailed away up the coast
to Livorno to plan the founding of a journal with a group of friends.
Caught in a storm on his return, he drowned at sea on July 8, 1822,
along with his friend Edward Williams and a young boat attendant. Percy
left his last poem, a shadowy work called "The Triumph Of Life",
unfinished.
Mary was tireless in promoting her late
husband's work, including editing and annotating unpublished material.
Despite their troubled later life together, she revered her late
husband's memory and helped build his reputation as one of the major
poets of the English Romantic period. But she also found occasions to
write a few more novels, including Valperga, The Fortunes of Perkin
Warbeck and Falkner. Critics say these works do not begin to approach
the power and fame of Frankenstein; The Last Man, a pioneering science
fiction novel of the human apocalypse in the distant future, is,
however, sometimes considered her best work, as is Maria, a novel
published posthumously.
Mary Shelley died on February 1, 1851 in
London and was interred at St. Peter's Churchyard in Bournemouth, in the
English county of Dorset.
Shelley on film
The genesis of the Frankenstein story in
1816 has been a popular subject for filmmakers and appears in at least
four films:
Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935);
Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley
Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986); Natasha
Richardson plays Mary Shelley
Haunted Summer (Ivan Passer, 1988); Alice
Krige plays Mary Shelley
Rowing With the Wind (Gonzalo Suárez,
1988); Lizzy McInnery plays Mary Shelley
****
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