About:
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born into a life of rebellion against the usual. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) considered by most to be one of the major landmarks in the slow revolt of women against their subjugation. Her father was William Godwin, radical and publisher. She was born five months after her parents’ marriage and her mother died ten days later.
The young Mary was to grow up in a strange household. It consisted of her father, her older half sister (Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate first child), her step-mother, Mary Jane Clairemont whom Godwin married when Mary was three but who she never liked, and Clairemont’s two children from her previous marriage, Charles and Jane (later called Claire, who was to become Mary’s close friend). The little girl was prone to sitting on her mother’s grave and reading Wollstonecraft’s books, behaviour unlikely to endear her to her new mother, and in an attempt to calm the domestic scene, Godwin sent Mary to live with the family of his friend William Baxter in Dundee, in the summer of 1812.
On one of her trips back to London to see her father later that year, Mary met Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of her father’s friends, who had been invited around for dinner with his wife. Eighteen months later in the spring of 1814 Mary returned to London and promptly ran off with Shelley much to her father’s fury, and more pertinently his father’s fury - the baronet on whose generosity most of them (including the now rather less radical Godwin) were relying.
The two lovers, accompanied extraordinarily by Mary’s half sister Claire ran away to Europe, but returned to England six weeks later when all three set up home together in London. The next couple of months were spent with Shelley on the run from his creditors, and on the 30th November 1814 his first wife gave birth to their second child. By early 1815 it was fairly clear that Shelley and Claire were having an affair, but in late February Mary gave birth to their first son, two months prematurely and the child only survived two weeks. Mary and Shelley then spent the summer touring Devon and in August set up home together, without Claire who was meanwhile being rather busy becoming Lord Byron’s mistress, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Their next child was born in January 1816.
There then followed the Byronic summer. Byron had moved, with his personal physician, Dr Polidori, to Lake Geneva, and Claire, who was pregnant with Byron’s child, persuaded the Shelleys to accompany her to Switzerland in pursuit. The two households set up near to each other on the shores of the lake and during an appallingly wet summer the group became embroiled in possibly one of the longest and certainly one of the most famous ghost story telling sessions of all time. Out of this was to come Mary Shelley’s tale of a man-made monster created by Dr Frankenstein and it was Byron who persuaded her later that summer to consider writing the story down. Over the next few months, as her literary life began to bloom, Mary’s astonishing private life careened on.
She returned to England and sequestered herself in Bath for the duration of Claire’s secret pregnancy. During the latter part of 1816 several fairly momentous events occurred, her elder step sister committed suicide, Shelley’s first wife went missing and was discovered a month later having drowned herself, pregnant, in the Serpentine in London, and a month after that Shelley and Mary finally married thus initiating a much longed for reconciliation with her father. Frankenstein was finished in the summer of 1817 and, after Mary gave birth to her third child, a daughter, in the autumn, it was published in January 1818. It was vastly successful, although most assumed it was Shelley’s work as no woman could possibly write like that, and the family moved back to London, with Claire and her new baby in tow. The whole entourage embarked on a journey to Italy in the summer of 1818 and again end up on Byron’s doorstep in Venice, where an unpleasant battle over the custody of the baby ensued.
The next five years were spent in Italy. She wrote two novels, Valperga and Mathilda, and two mythological dramas, Proserpine and Midas. She lost her youngest daughter, Clara, in 1818, her son, William, in 1819, and gave birth to another son at the end of the same year. In the summer of 1822 she nearly died from the haemorrhaging resulting from a miscarriage and a month later Shelley was drowned in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia. Mary attempted to remain in Italy, transcribing several of the cantos of Byron’s Don Juan, but eventually she returned to London with her son Percy Florence in 1823.
With Byron’s intervention Shelley’s father, the baronet, began to take responsibility for his grandson and the combination of the allowance he gave the child, and the moderate earnings from Mary’s increasing literary career, allowed her to establish a life for herself amongst the literati of nineteenth century London.
The second part of Mary Shelley’s tempestuous life has been characterised as the stiller, more conservative half. It was however, fairly consistent in its departure from the usual. She wrote novels and articles which shocked and expanded their readers’ horizons, including a further foray in to the genre that would become known as science fiction – The Last Man a vision of England in the 21st century where human beings are brought to the point of extinction, and the patriarchy is finally toppled. She was prevented for many years from publishing any of Shelley’s poetry, or the biography of him she longed to write, by her protracted battle with the baronet and more crucially his wife, concern for her son’s welfare being the hold they had over her. But she published three further novels, Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), and numerous short stories and articles. She was also part of a familiarly irregular domestic scene, being party to such national scandals as the elopement of her friend Isabella Douglas with the shadowy figure of Sholto Douglas, who turned out to be another of her friends, the writer, and woman, Mary Dods.
In 1844 Shelley’s father died and the estate and title passed onto Mary’s son Percy. A few years later he purchased some land close to the Shelley estate where he could build a manor house for his now ailing mother, and his not too healthy wife. But Mary Shelley never made it to Boscombe Manor, she died in London in 1851. On the orders of her daughter-in-law, her body was taken along with the exhumed remains of her father and mother’s bodies, to the parish church at Bournemouth on the estate where she was buried between them.