Mary Shelley
1797 – 1851 · United Kingdom
Known for: Author of Frankenstein, the novel that began modern science fiction
“She imagined the creature we have never stopped arguing about, and asked what its maker owed it.”
Biography
Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, on 30 August 1797, the daughter of two of the most radical writers in England. Her mother, the philosopher and advocate of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever eleven days after the birth, and her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, raised her on her mother's books and her mother's memory. He gave her almost no formal schooling but a remarkable informal education: the run of his library, a tutor, and the company of the writers and thinkers who came to the house. When she was four Godwin married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, whom his daughter came to detest, and at fifteen he described her as bold, imperious and almost invincible in her perseverance.
In 1814 she began a relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet and follower of her father, already married, and left for France with him and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. The years that followed brought debt, ostracism and the death of a daughter born too early; the couple married late in 1816, after Percy Shelley's first wife took her own life. In the summer of 1816 the three of them passed a cold and rainy season at a house near Geneva with Lord Byron and John William Polidori, and out of a competition to write ghost stories came the idea for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 when she was twenty. The novel gave the nineteenth century its central modern fable, a man who makes a living creature and abandons it, and counts as an early work of science fiction. She wrote a great deal more: the historical novel Valperga, the apocalyptic The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore and Falkner, a travel book, and biographical essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia.
Italy took all her children but one; Percy Florence survived. In 1822 her husband drowned when his boat went down in a storm off Viareggio. She returned to England the following year and lived by her pen, raising the boy and editing Percy Shelley's poems, work that did much to establish his reputation and long obscured her own. Her last decade was shadowed by illness, most probably the brain tumour that killed her on 1 February 1851 at the age of fifty three. Frankenstein has not been out of print or absent from stage and screen since, and modern scholarship has recovered the rest of her writing, in which she argued steadily that sympathy and cooperation, not solitary genius, hold a society together.