Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley the English novelist (1797-1851) best known as the author of Frankenstein, a work written in her youth that gave modern literature one of its most enduring myths and is often regarded as an early landmark of both the Gothic novel and science fiction.

Family and Early Life

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797 in London, the daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the age. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and died shortly after giving birth to her; her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher and novelist whose writings on political justice had made him famous. She grew up in a household filled with books and with the company of writers and reformers.

Denied a formal education of the kind given to boys, she educated herself in her father's library and read widely in history, philosophy and literature. Her early years were marked by the loss of her mother, by a difficult relationship with her stepmother, and by the intellectual ambition that her parents' example encouraged in her.

In 1814 she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a follower of her father's ideas, and the two eloped to Europe despite his existing marriage. The couple travelled through France and Switzerland amid financial difficulty and scandal, and they married in 1816 after the suicide of Shelley's first wife. Their life together was shadowed by the deaths of several of their children and by the hostility of respectable society.

The Writing of Frankenstein

In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley were staying near Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. The weather was cold and wet, and the group passed the time reading German ghost stories and then agreed to write tales of their own. Mary, then aged eighteen, was at first unable to think of a story, but after a waking dream of a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together, she began what would become Frankenstein.

The novel was published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who discovers the secret of imparting life to matter, assembles a human being from dead parts and animates it, only to recoil in horror from his own creation. The creature, rejected by its maker and by everyone it meets, is driven to loneliness and then to revenge.

The book is narrated in a complex series of framed letters and first-person accounts, so that the reader hears the story from the explorer Walton, from Frankenstein himself and from the creature. This layered structure, and the sympathy the novel extends to the creature, give the book a moral depth that has kept it alive for two centuries.

Themes and the Science of Life

Frankenstein explores the responsibility of the creator for his creation, the dangers of knowledge pursued without moral restraint, and the misery of a being who is intelligent and feeling yet utterly alone. The creature reads Milton's Paradise Lost and compares himself to both Adam and Satan, and his account of his own suffering raises the question of who is truly the monster in the story.

The novel also reflects the scientific and philosophical debates of its time. Experiments with electricity and the idea of galvanism, the possibility of reanimating dead tissue, excited much discussion in the early nineteenth century, and Mary Shelley drew on these ideas together with the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. Her father's radical philosophy and her mother's arguments about education and society are also present in the book's concern with justice and with the shaping power of upbringing.

The novel has been read as a parable about scientific hubris, about the neglect of children, and about the fear of the outsider. Its refusal to resolve these questions into a simple moral is part of its continuing power, and it has been interpreted anew by each generation of readers and critics.

Later Novels and Other Writing

After the death of Percy Shelley by drowning in 1822, Mary Shelley returned to England and devoted herself to supporting her surviving son and to her literary career. She edited her husband's poems for publication, an act of scholarly care that secured his posthumous reputation, and she continued to write novels, stories and essays to support herself.

Her later novels include Valperga, a historical romance set in medieval Italy; The Last Man, a futuristic tale of a plague that destroys humanity, which is sometimes called an early work of apocalyptic fiction; and Lodore and Falkner, which draw on her own experience of family and society. She also produced a travel book, Rambles in Germany and Italy, and many short stories and biographical essays.

Her writing after Frankenstein is less famous but repays attention. It shows her range as a novelist and her continuing interest in history, politics and the position of women. She was a professional author in an age when authorship was difficult for women, and her work was valued by readers and by the editors with whom she dealt.

Influence and Legacy

Frankenstein has become one of the most influential stories in modern culture. The word Frankenstein has entered the language as a name for any creation that turns against its creator, and the creature, though unnamed in the novel, has become a stock figure of film, theatre and popular imagination, often in versions far removed from Shelley's text.

The novel is now widely studied as a founding text of science fiction and as a key work of Gothic and Romantic literature. It is also read for its treatment of gender, of creation and birth, and of the ethics of science, and it has inspired countless adaptations, sequels and critical studies. Its place in the school and university curriculum is secure.

Mary Shelley died on 1 February 1851 in London and was buried with her parents. She is remembered as the author of a book written in extraordinary circumstances when she was barely more than a girl, and as a serious writer whose works, though overshadowed by her first novel, deserve a place in the history of English fiction. Her life and her art together illustrate both the constraints placed on women writers of her time and the intellectual power that could break through them.

See also

• Frankenstein
• Gothic fiction
• Romanticism
• Prometheus