Mary Shelley
1 book analyzed
Biography
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797-1851) was 18 years old when she conceived Frankenstein and 20 when it was published anonymously in 1818. She was the daughter of two of the most radical intellectuals of the age: William Godwin (political philosopher, anarchist) and Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), who died eleven days after giving birth to her. Mary grew up in her mother's intellectual shadow and her absence simultaneously. She eloped with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at 16, and their relationship was passionate, intellectually electric, and marked by repeated tragedy — miscarriages, the suicide of Percy's first wife, the deaths of their children. The summer of 1816, the 'Year Without a Summer' caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, forced the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and John Polidori to remain indoors at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Byron proposed a ghost story competition. Mary's contribution became Frankenstein.