Biography of Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who is better known as Mary Shelley, was the daughter of two of the most progressive thinkers of the 18th Century, philosopher William Godwin and feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England five months after her parents' wedding. Shortly after her birth (some say two weeks, others say four weeks) her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) developed complications from the delivery and died - unfortunately, not an uncommon tragedy for that time. William Godwin married a few years later, but Mary, in Cinderella fashion, had a difficult relationship with her stepmother. However, the home her father provided for her was filled with a constant stream of some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the day. Poets and thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge were frequent guests and they, along with her father’s extensive library, helped form young Mary’s intellectual and artistic soul.
When Mary was about fourteen she met the young and moody poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of a prominent aristocratic family. Rebellious and moody in a “poetic kind of way”, Shelley did what all rebellious young people did - and still do - he took up radical philosophies that were guaranteed to annoy his very square and conservative family. Shelley particularly idolized William Godwin for his very progressive (and of course, scandalous) social theories - that the poor were human beings and should have the same rights as the privileged class. Godwin despised the stupidity and cruelty of the class system, which of course infuriated Shelley's very rich and very conservative family. However, it was Shelly’s marriage to Harriet Westbrook, a tavern owner’s daughter, that really pushed them over the edge, and caused his curmudgeonly grandfather to cut him off from the family's very large funds. Now penniless, Percy and Harriet traveled to Ireland where they had a child, and tended to the needs of the Irish poor.
Two years later, Shelley made his way back to William Godwin’s home to pay homage to the great thinker. There he was reintroduced to the now grown up sixteen year old Mary Shelley (sixteen was considered a marriageable age) and they both fell in love. Mary tried to resist the young tortured poet but he proved to be very persuasive - particularly when he threatened suicide if she rejected him - and so she agreed to run off with him. He was, by the way, married, twenty-two, already a father to one child, and his wife Harriet was pregnant with their second child.
Finding the doors of London society resoundingly shut in their faces, Shelley and Wollstonecroft escaped to the Continent where they hid out from social disgrace and debt collectors.
In February, 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter prematurely, but the child survived only a few weeks and died from complications. The couple moved back to England and had a second child, a son, named William.
The year of 1816 was both a propitious one for the family and also one of great sorrow. In the summer of that year, in an attempt to improve Percy Shelley’s health, the couple decided to travel to Switzerland with their great good friend, and fellow Romantic poet, Lord Byron (who we will definitely learn more about later). It was an unseasonably wet and chilly summer and the vacationers found themselves cooped up and bored in Byron’s villa. Byron suggested during one particularly wet and stormy night that for fun everyone should write a ghost story and whoever wrote the best story would win. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin won the competition when - after she had finished reading the first draft of her “ghost story” - Byron ran shrieking from the room. This was the night Mary gave birth to her most famous creation, the frightening gothic tale of promethean ambition which became the book you are reading now - FRANKENSTEIN.
However, the rest of the year was a succession of one tragedy quickly following on the heels of another. In November, Mary’s half-sister committed suicide. And in December, Harriet, Shelley’s wife, suffering the horrors of the 19th Century’s callous disregard for destitute and abandoned mothers, drowned herself.
With Harriet's suicide finally releasing them to marry, Percy and Mary, traveled to England and married in the waning days of 1816 - December 30, 1816, to be exact, just a few short weeks following his wife's death. In 1817, a third child, a daughter named Clara, was born to the couple.
In 1818, in an attempt to improve Percy Shelley’s health, the family moved to the warmer climate of Italy where he and Mary’s fates were forever altered. There followed in quick succession in 1818 and 1819, the deaths of two of their children: William, their first surviving child, died in 1818, only to be followed in 1819 by the death of Clara. Grief stricken and despondent, Mary rallied in November of 1819, in Florence with the birth of a second son whom they named Percy, the only Shelley child to survive into adulthood.
On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident. His body was found washed ashore two weeks later - a volume of Sophocles and a book of poetry by John Keats were found in his pocket. As his body was consumed by a pyre on the shore, Lord Byron swam out to sea to watch the rising smoke carry off the soul of his good friend.
Mary Shelley, widowed at the age of twenty-five, having born four children and lost three, and now the mother of a small child, had to support herself by her writings, and by editing and publishing her husband’s poetry. Her father-in-law Sir Timothy Shelley did not want his son’s already scandal-wracked name to be printed in the newspaper ever again, and was resistant to the idea of his son’s poetry being published at all. Sir Timothy thought, as did all upper-crust men, that notoriety and poetry were not things men of good breeding dabbled in. To our luck Mary Shelley persisted in preserving the writings of one of our greatest Romantic poets and continued to write and create more of her own books, which included VALPERGA, written after the birth of her sole surviving son, Percy, and THE LAST MAN, which dealt with wide spread catastrophe, plus many more books and articles, but none were as popular or achieved the success of her first attempt, FRANKENSTEIN.
Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s son, Percy, graduated from Dublin’s prestigious university Trinity College and eventually married. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law, and continued writing and traveling, when, at the age of forty-eight, she developed a brain tumor and was nursed by her son until her death at the age of fifty-two.
posted by JUDITH at 1:59 AM
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