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shelley.docxBorn: 1797 Died: 1851 British novelist From: Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism.
Born in Somers Town, London, on August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft, the educational theorist and pioneer for women's rights, and William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher and bookseller. Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to Mary. She was brought up with her mother's other daughter, Fanny, whose father was the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. When Mary was three years old, Godwin married his next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, who introduced her two illegitimate children into the household: Mary Jane, who became known as Claire, and Charles. Mary acquired another half sibling when Godwin's second wife gave birth to William. With her sister Fanny she attended a "Dame School", the popular name given to a certain type of infant school run—often haphazardly—by an elderly lady, and then, for seven months in 1811, Miss Caroline Petman's school at Ramsgate, where the daughters of Dissenters were educated. While at home, Mary had access to her father's library and tutelage, benefiting from the historical books he wrote for children. Visiting tutors gave her lessons in art and French, in which she became fluent. Other languages she acquired included Latin, Greek, Italian, and some Spanish.
In June 1812 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was sent to Dundee for her health and stayed at the home of William Baxter, who had supported her father during his opposition to the Treason Trials of 1794. The house at Broughty Ferry overlooked the romantic scene of a 15th-century castle. In the 1831 introduction to her most acclaimed novel, Frankenstein, she wrote that trees and mountains were where her imaginative works were fostered. Mary stayed with the Baxters, who became a second family, for 16 months. One of the daughters, Christina, made a return visit with Mary to the Godwins in London. The day after their arrival on November 11, 1812, they are believed to have met the young Romantic poet and aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was accompanied by his wife, Harriet Westbrook, and her older sister. Mary resumed her sojourn in Scotland until March 1814 when, on returning to the Godwin household, she found that Shelley had established himself as a firm favorite with her sisters. He was also a disciple of the writings of their father, to whom he gave financial assistance, a circumstance later fictionalized in hershort story "The Parvenue" (1836). The poet also revered Wollstonecraft (her mother, also a poet), whose works he and Mary are reputed to have read aloud at her graveside as their romance blossomed. William Godwin disapproved of their union as Shelley was still married and his wife was expecting their second child.
On July 28, 1814, the lovers eloped to France, taking with them Mary's half sister Claire. Mary later published a version of her journal account of their travels as the jointly authored History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which was also a travelogue of the inner Romantic journey. The impoverished trio wandered around Europe, which had been ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, returning to England in September. On February 22, 1815, Mary gave birth to a premature daughter, who survived for just 11 days. In her journal she recorded a dream of the baby coming back to life. This ties in with the theme of reanimation, which characterized some of her fiction, most notably Frankenstein.
Between September 1814 and July 1815, the couple stayed in a series of lodging houses before settling at Bishopsgate on the edge of Windsor Great Park, which furnished in part the setting of Mary's third novel, The Last Man (1826). While living there, she gave birth to their son, William, in January 1816. The following May they departed for Geneva with Claire Clairmont to rendezvous with Lord Byron, who was spending the summer in Switzerland. Their destination had been determined by the fact that Claire was pregnant with Byron's child and hoped, at the very least, for his paternal support. The convergence of Byron, his physician John Polidori, and Shelley's party would lead to a cross-fertilization of literary production culminating in the publication ofFrankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
As Mary Shelley explained in her introduction to the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831, her inspiration for the novel had been the idea for members of the group to tell each other ghost stories of their own invention. According to Mary's anonymous account as given to Thomas Moore in his Life of Lord Byron (1835) the great poet had suggested that they should all contribute to a book, which his fame would help sell. This entertainment took place in 1816 at Villa Diodati at the side of Lake Leman in Geneva, Switzerland, during that "wet and uncongenial summer" (Shelley 1980, 7) as Mary wrote in the 1831 Preface to Frankenstein. These adverse weather conditions had come about due to the activity of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, south of Borneo, which proved to be the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history. This had resulted in the coldest summer on record, which ironically precipitated the forging of Frankensteinfrom the heart of a volcano.
The night of the ghost-story writing proposed by Byron might have been June 13, when the group had been driven indoors by an electrical storm. Lightning has been associated in the popular imagination, mainly through film adaptations, with the genesis of Shelley's monstrous birth myth. In her 1831 introduction, she indicates how a conversation about galvanism had helped spark her creativity. Byron's guests diverted themselves by reading some German ghost stories translated into French, entitled Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur (1812), which, according to the preface of the 1818 edition "excited in us a playful desire of imitation" (Shelley, 1980, 14). Two of these, "The Death-Bride", about a spectral lover, and "The Family Portraits", in which a portrait comes to life, influenced Mary's creation along with her "waking dream", which probably took place on June 16. Her tale of a creature created out of the parts of cadavers, which would seek vengeance upon its creator, would emerge as one of the most powerful and enduring myths to explode out of the gothic tradition.
On returning to England, Mary lodged at 5 Abbey Churchyard in Bath, where she continued her plan of transforming her tale into a novel. While writing in October, she learned of the suicide of her half sister Fanny, who had died after taking laudanum at the Mackworth Arms in Swansea. The following December, there was more sad news. Percy Shelley's wife Harriet, whom he had left (though no official separation had taken place), had taken her own life by drowning in Hyde Park's artificial lake known as the Serpentine. The exact date of her death is disputed, but it freed him to marry Mary at St. Mildred's Church in London on December 30, 1816. In January 1817 Claire gave birth to Byron's daughter, Alba, known later as Allegra, and during the following September, Mary's second daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, was born.
By this time the Shelleys had been living at Albion House, Marlow, in Buckinghamshire for five months, and it was here that Frankenstein reached completion. The novel was published anonymously in three volumes on January 1, 1818. The author was assumed by some to be a disciple of William Godwin, to whom it was dedicated. Walter Scott alighted on Percy Shelley as the obvious candidate; in fact, Shelley had only actually written the preface, though he had helped edit the novel. Mary's name appeared on the title page of the second edition, issued in 1823, the year after Percy's death. The person responsible for this publication was Godwin, who also made minor alterations from the first edition. In August that year, the story was dramatized by Richard Brinsley Peake as Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley saw performed at the Lyceum and the English Opera House in London. It proved highly successful, and a new version was staged in Paris.
In March 1818, the Shelleys set sail from Dover for the Continent, prompted by concerns for Percy's health and fears that after the Lord Chancellor gave custody of his children by Harriet to her family, the law would take away his children by Mary. The tragic loss of their children, however, came about in other ways. In September 1818 their two-year-old daughter, Clara, died from dysentery in Venice, and their three-year-old son, William, died of malaria, otherwise known as "Roman fever", in Rome in June 1819. Their fourth and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, was born on November 12, 1819, in Florence. It was here that Mary Shelley started research work on a historical novel set in the 14th century, eventually called Valperga, or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio Castracani (1823), the idea for which she had conceived in Marlow in 1817. It concerns the clash between tyranny and republicanism. Castruccio is a despotic warlord who is modeled on the actual feudal lord of Lucca. He is in love with Euthanasia, who rules the fortress of Valperga in a peaceful and conciliatory way according to the principles of reason and sensibility.
In January 1820 the Shelleys moved to Pisa. That year Mary Shelley wrote the mythological verse drama Midas and the children's story Maurice, or, The Fisher's Cot, before settling, probably in the autumn, to the composition of Valperga, a task that occupied most of 1821. In April 1822, the first of more terrible losses for that year struck with the death of Clare's daughter Allegra. The news arrived while the Shelleys were at Casa Magni at San Terenzo, their summer residence. In June Mary narrowly escaped dying after a miscarriage, and in July Percy was drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici.
The death of her husband, followed by that of their friend Byron in 1824, prompted Mary Shelley to declare herself to be "the last relic of a beloved race" and to identify with the eponymous hero Lionel Verney of her apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826). Verney is the last survivor of a plague that has wiped out the human race. This pessimistic vision was seen as unfeminine, and the book was blasted by one critic as an "elaborate piece of gloomy folly"; The book was even banned in Austria. Shelley was so disheartened by the criticism that she returned to the historical romance and wrote The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, set at the end of the 15th century. Warbeck had been a pretender to the English throne during the reign of Henry VII, and Shelley believed him to be the lost duke of York, long believed to have been murdered in the tower, reputedly on the orders of Richard III. The novel was eventually published in 1830 as an antimonarchical historical romance.
Financial distress also forced Shelley to start writing stories and essays for periodicals in 1823. For example, she published one story and two essays in The Liberal in 1823, and a year later there appeared, in London Magazine, "On Ghosts"; "Recollections of Italy"; and "The Bride of Italy", which was based on Percy's infatuation with Teresa (Emilia) Viviani. Mary also started submitting material to annuals and gift books, and between 1823 and 1839 she wrote more than 20 stories for gift books or periodicals; 16 of these stories were published in Keepsake. Examples include: "The Evil Eye" (1829), which evokes Albanian superstition, and "The Dream" (1831), set during the reign of Henry IV of France. She also published two well-known tales dealing with the supernatural: "Transformation" (1830), based on Byron's drama The Deformed Transformed (1824), which Mary Shelley had copied for him; and "The Mortal Immortal" (1833). She wrote most of the essays for the five volumes of the Rev. Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet of Biography: Lives of the most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and Lives of the most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–39).
For the third edition of Frankenstein, published in 1831, Shelley wrote a longer introduction and made extensive revisions. In this version, the portrayal of the hero, Victor Frankenstein, who is believed to be based partly on her late husband, was made more sympathetic. Victor is a Romantic scientist who isolates himself while carrying out nefarious experiments with the parts of dead bodies. His creation of a monstrous being, which he rejects, has been seen as an allegory of the child-parent relationship, drawing on the creation of Adam as derived from John Milton'sParadise Lost. As suggested by the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein is an example of the Romantic overreacher, who transgresses boundaries between the human and the divine. The creature is motivated initially by the more ordinary desire for a family and eventually finds the idealized De Laceys, but they too reject him. In retaliation, he targets Victor's family members, including his youngest brother, William, and fiancée, Elizabeth, before disappearing into the Arctic wastes, ostensibly to destroy himself. Like her mother, Mary Shelley emphasized the importance of the domestic affections, and in Frankenstein she demonstrates how the neglect of family relations can trigger tragedy.
The search for, and return to, origins was the Romantics' Holy Grail, which Shelley pursued through the search for parentage. In her mythological drama Proserpine (composed 1820, published 1832), a mother searches for her daughter, who has been snatched by the god of the underworld. The heroine is described as a "child of light", a phrase that Percy Shelley had first used inallusion to his wife and her maternal heritage. Like Mary Shelley herself, several of her other heroines are motherless. In her second novel, Mathilda, composed in 1819, the heroine, whose mother dies shortly after giving her birth, forms a close bond with her father. She is troubled when he distances himself from her. The reason, as he eventually divulges, is because he has been harboring an unlawful and monstrous love for his daughter. Mary Shelley sent the manuscript to her father, who was so disgusted with the content that he refused either to publish it or return it to her despite repeated requests. It was not published until 1959.
In Shelley's sixth novel, Lodore (1835), the Byronic Lord Lodore abducts his daughter, Ethel, and takes her to the American wilderness to live in isolation. After he dies in a duel, Ethel is befriended by the intellectual and independent Fanny Derham (thought to be based on Shelley's friend Fanny Wright, an advocate for women's rights) and is eventually reconciled with her mother. Shelley reworked the father-daughter relationship for her short story "The Mourner" (1829), about a supposed parricide, and in her final novel, Falkner (1837). Here, Rupert Falkner forsakes his beloved Alithea for a life in India. When he returns he discovers that she has married another man, believing Falkner to be dead. She drowns trying to escape him. He adopts an orphaned girl, Elizabeth Raby, who falls in love with Alithea's son, Gerard Neville. Falkner tries to sever the relationship. He is convicted of the murder of Alithea but is finally freed and then forgiven by Gerard. Family values, particularly familial duty, was important to Mary Shelley both in and outside of fiction. In 1837 she started work on writing her father's life and editing his papers, a task she never completed, and in 1839 and 1840 she produced multivolumed editions of her husband's poetry, which included previously unpublished poems and her own valuable biographical and contextual notes. In 1840 she published Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols).
Readers can find in Mary Shelley's work the Romantic themes of the wanderer, incest, suicide, nature, and the sublime. Her writings grapple with the challenge of creating a society that endorses the values of collaboration, equality, education, and harmony with the natural world. Her final full-length work was her two-volume Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), which was based on letters written during two journeys that she had taken with her son, who inherited the Shelley baronetcy upon his paternal grandfather's death in 1844, becoming Sir Percy.
Toward the end of her life, Mary Shelley went to live with her son and his wife, Jane, at her husband's boyhood home, Field Place in Sussex. Here she planned to write Shelley's biography, until illness intervened. For about two years the family lived at Field Place and at a house in Chester Square in London while Sir Percy was purchasing a new house near Bournemouth. When Mary Shelley knew that she was dying, she asked to be buried with her parents at St. Pancras. According to the literary historian Emily Sunstein, Shelley turned down Edward Trelawny's offer that she take his burial plot next to that of Percy Shelley in Rome, on the basis that it was too costly. She died on February 1, 1851, of meningioma (a type of brain tumor) at Chester Square. The bodies of her parents were exhumed and reburied on either side of their daughter in Bournemouth near Boscombe Manor, the home of her son.
Further Information
Blumberg, Jane. Mary Shelley's Early Novels. Houndmills, Eng.: Macmillan, 1993.
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. Houndmills, Eng.: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Fisch, Audrey, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge, 1988.
Morrison, Lucy, and Staci L. Stone. The Mary Shelley Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844. 2 vols. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
———. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88.
———. Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories. 2nd ed. Edited by Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
———. The Mary Shelley Reader. Edited by Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
———. Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings. 4 vols. Edited by Nora Crook et al. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002.
———. Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot. Edited by Claire Tomalin. London: Penguin, Viking, 1998.
———. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. 8 vols. Edited by Nora Crook et al. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996.
———. The Original Frankenstein. Edited by Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2008.
———. Frankenstein. Edited by M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989.
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Nora Crook.
Citation Information
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft." In Maunder, Andrew, ed Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 6 Mar. 2016. <http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin=ELR0300&SingleRecord=True>.
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