Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the author of Frankenstein (1818), one of the most influential novels ever written — the founding work of science fiction, a masterpiece of Gothic horror, and the source of a myth that has outgrown its book: the scientist who creates life and is destroyed by his creation. She began it at eighteen, in a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva. The daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the age, the wife of one of its great poets, she lived a life of scandal, exile and grief — three of her four children died young, and her husband drowned when she was twenty-four — and supported herself by writing novels, stories, travel books and biographies, and by editing Percy Shelley’s poems, which she did more than anyone to make famous.

Life

A radical inheritance

Mary was born in London on 30 August 1797, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the founding text of English feminism, and William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher of Political Justice (1793). Her mother died of puerperal fever eleven days after her birth. Godwin, devoted but distant, brought her up with Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s daughter by an earlier lover; in 1801 he married his neighbour Mary Jane Clairmont, whom Mary disliked, and who brought two children of her own, including Claire Clairmont. Mary had no formal schooling but grew up among her father’s books and visitors — Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt — and once hid behind the sofa to hear Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Elopement

In 1814 the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, an aristocratic atheist and radical disciple of Godwin, began visiting the house. He was twenty-one and married, with a child; she was sixteen. They declared their love at her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard, and on 28 July 1814 eloped to France, taking Claire Clairmont with them. Godwin, despite his theories of free love, was outraged and refused to see them. They travelled through war-ravaged France, Switzerland and down the Rhine, an adventure Mary recorded in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817). Back in London they were social outcasts, hounded by creditors. Mary’s first child, a daughter born prematurely in 1815, died within days; she dreamed that the baby “came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.”

The summer of 1816

In May 1816, with their infant son William and Claire — who was pursuing Lord Byron and pregnant by him — Mary and Percy went to Geneva. Byron had rented the Villa Diodati on the shore of the lake; the Shelleys took a house nearby. It was “the year without a summer”: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year had darkened skies across the world; it rained incessantly; thunderstorms crashed over the lake. Confined indoors, the company — Byron, his young physician John Polidori, Percy, Mary and Claire — read German ghost stories aloud, and Byron proposed: “We will each write a ghost story.”

Mary struggled for days. Then, after a long night’s conversation between Byron and Percy about galvanism, the experiments of Erasmus Darwin and whether a corpse might be reanimated, she lay awake and had a waking vision:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.

The next day she began: “It was on a dreary night of November…” What she intended as a short tale grew into a novel. (Polidori’s contribution, The Vampyre, founded another genre.)

Marriage and grief

That autumn Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay killed herself; in December, Percy’s abandoned wife Harriet, pregnant, drowned herself in the Serpentine. Within weeks Percy and Mary married, partly in a vain attempt to gain custody of Percy’s children by Harriet. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in January 1818, with a preface by Percy and a dedication to Godwin. Many reviewers assumed Percy had written it.

In 1818 the Shelleys moved to Italy, wandering between Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence and Pisa. Their daughter Clara died in Venice in 1818 and their son William in Rome in 1819; Mary fell into a deep depression, during which she wrote the novella Mathilda (about a father’s incestuous love; unpublished until 1959). Their son Percy Florence was born in November 1819 and survived. In 1822, at San Terenzo on the Gulf of Spezia, Mary nearly died of a miscarriage, saved by Percy, who sat her in a bath of ice. A month later, on 8 July 1822, Percy and his friend Edward Williams drowned when their boat, the Don Juan, went down in a storm. Their bodies washed up days later and were cremated on the beach; Percy’s heart, which would not burn, was saved by his friend Edward Trelawny and given eventually to Mary.

Widowhood and writing

Mary returned to England in 1823 with her son. Percy’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, gave her a small allowance on condition that she not publish his son’s biography or keep the Shelley name before the public. She wrote for a living: the historical novel Valperga (1823); The Last Man (1826), set in the late twenty-first century, in which a plague destroys humanity and the narrator, Lionel Verney, wanders the empty world alone — a portrait of her own bereavement among the dead Romantics; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830); Lodore (1835); Falkner (1837); stories for annuals; biographical essays for an encyclopedia. She revised Frankenstein for an 1831 edition with a famous introduction describing its origin. Her edition of Percy’s Poetical Works (1839), with her notes, established his reputation. She travelled with her son in Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). She never remarried, although she had admirers. She died of a brain tumour in London on 1 February 1851, aged fifty-three.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein tells, through nested narratives, the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young Genevan who discovers at university the secret of life, builds a man from parts of corpses, and flees in horror when it opens its “dull yellow eye”. The abandoned creature, intelligent and sensitive, educates himself by spying on a family of cottagers and reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch and Goethe’s Werther, but is rejected by every human he meets. He turns to revenge, killing Victor’s brother, friend and bride, and the two pursue each other to the Arctic. The novel’s power lies in the creature’s eloquence and in its moral question: who is the monster?

Ideas and themes

Creation and responsibility. Victor’s sin is not only overreaching ambition — “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” — but his abandonment of the being he made. The creature’s plea, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel”, is an indictment of a creator who refuses to love.

Birth, death and the body. Critics such as Ellen Moers have read Frankenstein as a “birth myth” written by a teenage mother who had lost a baby and whose own birth killed her mother; the novel is haunted by dead mothers and by a male scientist who creates life without a woman.

Society and outcasts. Following her parents’ political thought and Rousseau’s, the novel suggests that the creature was born good and made evil by rejection and injustice: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

Romantic ambition. Victor, like Walton the Arctic explorer, and perhaps like Percy Shelley and Byron, pursues glory in isolation from human ties. The novel is both a Romantic work and a critique of Romantic egotism.

Legacy

Frankenstein became a myth almost immediately: a stage adaptation, Presumption (1823), which Mary saw and enjoyed, introduced the laboratory, the lumbering, mute monster and the assistant. James Whale’s film (1931), with Boris Karloff’s flat-headed, bolt-necked creature, fixed the image; Bride of Frankenstein (1935) followed. “Frankenstein” — often wrongly used for the monster — became a byword for science out of control: “Frankenfood”, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence. Brian Aldiss called her novel the first true work of science fiction. The Last Man was rediscovered in the twentieth century as a pioneering apocalyptic novel. Feminist scholars since the 1970s have recovered Mary Shelley as a major writer in her own right.

In conversation

• A Frankenstein — a creation that escapes and turns on its maker (strictly the maker’s name, not the monster’s).
• “The modern Prometheus” — the scientist who steals the fire of life and pays the price.
• “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend” — the argument that cruelty is made, not born.