Jtlary Yvollstonecrajt Shelley (1797-1851) Author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley seemed des­ tined from birth for distinction in the world ofletters. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneering feminist author of The Vindication ef the Rights ef Woman (1792), and her father was William Godwin, whose treatise An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) made him the leading British philosopher of his time. Both wrote novels and were part of a circle of radical London intel­ lectuals who espoused egalitarian principles inspired by the American and French revolutions. Although both Wollstonecraft and Godwin were op­ posed to the institution of marriage, for the sake of their unborn child they wed five months before her birth in London on 30 August 1797· Wollstone­ craft died from complications of childbirth, and Mary spent her earliest years in the care of relatives and friends. When Mary was four Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont; finally Mary had a stable home, if not an altogether happy one. She and her stepmother never got along, and her father, whom she adored, was a remote parent. Mary could often be found sitting in nearby St. Pancras churchyard by the grave of her mother, whom she idolized but had never known, reading and rereading Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's works. Mary had no formal schooling, but being part of the Godwin household was an excellent education in itself. Her father knew all of the leading writers and intellectuals, and Mary grew up surrounded by books and enlightened discussion. One night she heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In 1812 Percy Bysshe Shelley, an aristocratic disciple of both Wollstone­ craft and Godwin, came to Skinner Street to sit at the feet of the author of Political Justice. At the time he took little notice of fourteen-year-old Mary, who shortly thereafter went for the sake of her health to Scotland. How­ ever, in the spring of 1814, when Mary next encountered the twenty-one­ year-old Shelley, she had blossomed into an engaging and attractive young woman of sixteen. Before long, over Mary Wollstonecraft's grave, they de- 662 Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley dared their love for one another. Ignoring the conventions of the world and her father's wishes, on 28 July r8r4 Mary eloped with Shelley, begin­ ning the nomadic existence she would know for the whole of her life with him. Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, joined them. The threesome trav­ eled across France, among the first English tourists to witness firsthand the devastation and human misery left by the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars, and Switzerland. They returned to London in mid-September to suffer the severe social consequences of their action. William Godwin refused to see Mary or to communicate with her in any way. Former friends, scandalized by her behavior, would have nothing to do with her. Harriet Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife, hired a lawyer. For a time Shelley was in danger of being imprisoned for debt. In February r8r5 Mary gave birth to a premature infant, whom the doctor said could not live. But Mary read Germaine de Stael's Corrine and nursed the baby. Two weeks later she found the infant dead. Soon afterwards she recorded in her jour­ nal, "Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived- ." 1 That August, a year after their first elopement, with financial matters settled for the time being, the lovers set up their first household in Bishopsgate, near Windsor. There Mary gave birth to their son William in January r8r6. Thomas Love Peacock was a frequent visitor, but Mary Godwin's family still refused to see her. Neverthe­ less, William Godwin demanded that Shelley continue to provide him with financial support. The couple left for Switzerland in May 1816. From the beginning their life together had included a rigorous program of reading, both to each other and alone, in poetry, fiction, drama, history, travel writing, biography, philoso­ phy, and classical literature, which they pursued during an unusually cold and rainy summer near Lake Geneva. They met Lord Byron at Secheron at the end of May and soon saw him almost daily at his Villa Diodati; Mary, Shelley, and Byron himself were all to be deeply affected, both from a personal and a literary standpoint, by the close relationship that developed between them. -In June Byron proposed a contest for writing the best ghost story, and the next day he and Shelley each began one. Eighteen-year-old Mary, feeling the pressure of her distinguished literary parentage and intimidated by the fame of Byron and the literary talent of her partner, could not think of a story for a week. However, a discussion of the possibility of reanimating corpses through galvanism, along with Mary Godwin's own sublimated longing for r. Entry for 19 March 1815, The journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Dina Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), l :70. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley her dead mother and infant as well as anxiety about her literary abilities, came together to inspire a horrific "waking dream." She later recalled, "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 oflife, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.... His success would terrify the artist." 2 Mary Shelley knew she had found the germ of her story, and after Byron and Shelley set off for a trip around Lake Geneva she sat down and began, "It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." When Shelley returned, Mary showed him her short prose tale, and he urged her to expand it. The mythic novel she crafted over the next nine months, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, expresses in the veiled and transmuted manner of a nightmarish dream its author's own fears, anxieties, and emotional response to her excommunication from her family. It is the story of failed parent­ hood, artistic inadequacy, and knowledge misused, which produce a creature shunned by humanity, an outcast longing for love and acceptance but experi­ encing only the cruelest rejection. The book implicitly calls attention to the shortcomings of Godwin's philosophy. The psychological landscape of the novel was also shaped by traumatic events that took place during its compo­ sition, the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Harriet Shelley. Victor Frankenstein, the "creator," the solitary artist, and the creature's double, ne­ glects his family as he pursues his Promethean ambition and is responsible for the deaths of those close to him, inspiring the guilt and despair Mary Shelley herself knew all too well. Though some commentators have tried to argue that the success of the novel owes much to Percy Bysshe Shelley's editorial suggestions, in fact his contribution was no greater than that of many editors, and Mary Shelley did not always adopt his suggestions.3 Despite its awkwardnesses, the power of Frankenstein owes much to its having ful­ filled its author's wish to "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature." 4 The publishing firms of John Murray and Charles Oilier rejected the novel, but Lackington published it in ISIS. Although some denounced it for impiety, Walter Scott gave it high praise in Blackwood's Edinburgh Review, unaware, like others, that the anonymous novel had been authored by a young woman. When Mary Shelley revealed her authorship to Scott, the news enhanced the 2. From Mary Shelley's introduction to Frankenstein, Standard Novels (London, 1831), x. 3. For a discussion of this issue, see Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston, 1989), 127, 430-3r. 4. Introduction to Frankenstein, ix. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley 665 book's sensation. The first science-fiction novel, it was a popular success from the beginning. In August 1816 the couple returned to England and settled in Bath. They married on 30 December 1816. In March the Shelleys moved to Marlow, and in September Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara Everina. At the end of the year Mary published anonymously with Thomas Hookham a travel book, History of a Six Weeks' Tour, drawn from the journal the couple had kept dur­ ing their elopement, with extracts from the letters written on their journey. Shortly thereafter the family moved to London, but by mid-March they were off to Italy. They migrated from Milan to Pisa to Leghorn to Bagni di Lucca. In September 1818 one-year-old Clara Everina died from dysentery. Mary, grief-stricken, remained depressed and withdrawn for months. All her ma­ ternal affections were now focused on three-year-old William. The family traveled to Rome, then to Venice, then back to Rome again. In early June 1819 William contracted a serious fever and died on 7 June. Having lost her two children within a year, Mary, who was pregnant, sank into a severe, suicidal depression and withdrew from all those around her, including her husband. He wrote: My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone, And left me in this dreary world alone? Thy form is here indeed-a lovely one- But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road, That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode; Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair, where For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.5 It was in this context that in August 1819 Mary Shelley began drafting "The Fields of Fancy," later retitled Matilda, a tragic tale of incestuous love between a father and his daughter.