Mary Shelley: Beyond the Beast

In her time, Mary Shelley was an esteemed author, her political and feminist ideals inspiring her contemporaries.

Today, she is remembered for little more than her Gothic novel Frankenstein, and her relationship with poet Percy Shelley. It’s a great affront to a great artist, and to many, it will not come as a surprise.

So join us as we look back at the impactful career of an esteemed writer, and right the wrongs of a world that has neglected to give her fair attention.

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Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, 1797. She was so named after her mother, a respected philosopher and writer herself. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died less than a month after giving birth to Shelley, leaving father William to raise her and half-sister Fanny. William, a journalist, would write his memoirs of Wollstonecraft a year later, and it was these recollections that allowed Shelley to remain connected with her mother long after she was gone.

The family struggled for money in the years that followed, and Shelley received a limited formal education, but benefited from her father’s tutelage and interactions with intellectual houseguests such as William Wordsworth and US vice-president Aaron Burr. For what it lacked in terms of depth, this education made up for in scope, offering Shelley a greater understanding of the world than most girls of the time. By 15, she was described as “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible”.

Shelley proved as creative as she was intelligent, drawing and writing stories and poems throughout her youth. Her first poem, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, was published by her father when she was 10.

In 1812, Shelley was sent to live with radical dissident William Baxter in Scotland. The spacious surroundings of the land fuelled her words. “It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.”

Upon her return, she met poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, an acquaintance of her father who intended to bail him out of debt. Although he was married at the time, Shelley was drawn to his rebellious philosophy and keen philanthropy. The pair fostered their love in secret, and when they were found out in 1814, they eloped to France. “It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance,” Shelley recalled of her time travelling through the country.

The romance struck rocky ground when they returned to England. Shelley became pregnant, they had no means of finance, and their families had rejected them both. The situation was so intense that when they established a home in Nelson Square, Percy often had to disappear for extended periods of time to avoid creditors.

Over the next year, Shelley gave birth to two children, the latter of whom survived little longer than a week. She was stooped in depression for nearly a year, and when she finally broke its hold, the family, along with Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, spent the summer with the great poet Lord Byron on Lake Geneva. It was an adventure that would shape her career.

As they sat around the fire, rain pouring down outside, Byron proposed each member of the group should write a ghost story. For days, Shelley struggled to conjure an idea. When it finally struck her one evening, her idea frightened and excited her so much that she lay in bed, gripped in terror.

“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 of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, with a preface by Percy. When eventually it was learnt that Shelley herself was responsible, critics argued that she could only have been capable of spinning such an incredible tale with her husband’s support. Such derogatory commentary would continue for some time, but Shelley mostly ignored it, especially in the face of family trauma.

That same year, Shelley and her family left for Italy, with the intent of relocating there permanently, even if they wouldn’t stay in one place for too long. Sadly, Shelley lost both her children within nine months of each other.

From then on, she lived life by her pen. She wrote the autobiographical novella Mathilda, historical novel Valperga, and two plays, Proserpine and Midas, all while dealing with a miscarriage, and the death of Percy while he sailed at sea.

Returning to England in 1823, Shelley consoled herself by writing memoirs of her late husband (even though his relatives deeply disapproved), as well as The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic novel well before its time.

For 13 years from 1827-1840, she worked extensively as an editor and writer, producing in all 7 novels, 22 short stories, 21 articles and major reviews, and three plays.

By the end of this period, her health was waning. Little did she realise that cancer was slowly and surely taking hold of her brain.  Ultimately, she would die from a suspected brain tumour at the age of 53. One year after her death, her surviving son opened her desk to find locks of her dead children’s hair, a notebook shared between Percy and herself, a copy of his poem, some of his ashes, and the remains of his heart.

In the century that followed, Mary Shelley’s reputation waned, even as stage and screen adaptations of her work flourished. It was only when her work started to be republished in the mid 20th century that she came to take her place as an icon of the Romantic era, and her achievements fully realised.

Too long was she discredited as a one-novel author, or simply the wife of a better writer. It is only right that we now celebrate Shelley as we should: as a defining figure of early gothic horror and sci-fi, and a pillar of strength and skill standing firm against the many hardships which threatened to tear it down.