Six-minute summary: Mary Shelley

Hello readers! This week’s six-minute summary is of a science fiction author rather than a scientist. Mary Shelley is most famous for writing Frankenstein, which is widely viewed as the first science fiction novel (although the definition of science fiction is up for debate). Frankenstein’s monster is one of the most famous literary characters in existence, but its creator is far less well known.

An unorthodox upbringing

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 under a different name, Mary Godwin, because she wasn’t married yet. Her father was William Godwin, a political philosopher who was also the father of the anarchist movement (the oldest and most metaphorical of Mary’s siblings). Her mother was the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft, an advocate of women’s rights. She insisted that women only appeared to be inferior to men because they weren’t educated to the same level – a revolutionary idea for the time.

When Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin, she already had a 3-year-old daughter named Fanny Imlay, the product of a turbulent and decidedly unmarried relationship with American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Neither Mary Wollstonecraft nor William Godwin believed in marriage, although their opinions on the matter shifted rapidly when they realised Mary Wollstonecraft was pregnant again. Despite being the father of the anarchist movement, it seems that William Godwin also wanted to be father of someone who could legally inherit his belongings.

Sadly, Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after Mary Shelley was born, having caught an infection during the birth. A grief-stricken William Godwin published a biography to honour her memory, but in doing so he destroyed her reputation. People were horrified to learn that Mary Wollstonecraft’s first child was illegitimate, and her readership crashed overnight. Not even deceased 18^th century authors were safe from getting cancelled.

William Godwin remarried when Mary Godwin was four. Her new stepmother brought along two more illegitimate children to add to the Godwin brood, and Mary became very close to her new stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who was only eight months younger than her. The girls never received a formal education, but they had a tutor to teach them Roman and Greek history (the most important aspect of 18^th century life), and they met their father’s influential friends, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of rimes, depression and opium fame) and Aaron Burr (main antagonist of the smash-hit musical Hamilton).

Along comes Percy Shelley

Nowadays, Percy Shelley is one of the most well-known romantic poets, but he never achieved fame in his lifetime. When he met Mary, he was merely a rebellious rich kid writing edgy poetry to bring down the establishment and stick it to the man. In fact, his essay The Necessity of Atheism (1811) led to him being “rusticated” from Oxford, which led to me discovering that “rusticated” means suspended or excluded (the term is used solely by Oxford, Cambridge and, of course, Durham). The rusticated Percy told his father that he intended to donate his fortune to the disadvantaged. Percy’s father then rusticated him from his inheritance.

In 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley started their relationship. Mary was 16, Percy was 21, and Percy’s wife Harriet was 18 and pregnant. As if this wasn’t unsettling enough, Mary and Percy used to meet by Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave (and I’m using “meet” as a polite 19^th century euphemism). They eloped to France two months later, bringing Mary’s stepsister Claire along with them. In an entirely predictable turn of events, the privileged anti-establishment poet soon ran out of money, and they all had to come back to London.

Ostracised and in debt, Mary and Percy moved in together. This was not a happy time for Mary: her father wanted nothing to do with her, her boyfriend routinely sneaked out to “meet” with her stepsister, and her boyfriend’s wife had just given birth to a legitimate heir to the Shelley fortune. Mary also gave birth a few months later, but her child died within ten days. Mary was only 17 at the time.

The summer of 1816

This was the year that Mary started writing Frankenstein. Lord Byron (poet, literal gay lord, Greek hero) invited Percy, Mary and Claire to stay with him near Geneva. Fortunately for us readers centuries later, the weather was so gloomy that they couldn’t go exploring, and this meant that they spent hours concocting ghost stories to terrify each other. This is where the idea for Frankenstein was born – one of the most influential novels ever written. The holiday ended when Claire told Byron that he had got her pregnant (he had a knack for that), which he wasn’t too happy about (you think he’d learn).

The rest of 1816 was a tumultuous time. Mary’s older stepsister Fanny killed herself in October, having apparently been in love with Percy, and then Percy’s wife Harriet killed herself in December, having been abandoned by Percy. Before the year was out, Percy and Mary were married, seemingly in an effort to help Percy gain the custody of his son. The ploy didn’t work: the judge ruled that, as an atheist and adulterer, Percy Shelley was unfit to raise Harriet’s child. But from then on, Mary Godwin was known as Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein is published

In 1818, Mary published her first novel: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She published it anonymously, and most people assumed that Percy Shelley had written it, because it was dedicated to his political hero William Godwin, and because Percy Shelley had non-anonymously written the preface. Even decades later, when Mary Shelley was known to be the author, people suggested that Percy wrote or re-wrote large chunks of the text. Recent studies have shown that he actually made fewer edits than any modern-day line editor – but some people still believe that Mary Shelley could never have published such a groundbreaking novel without the help of her genius husband. This seems somewhat misguided considering that Percy was hardly well-known at the time, and that Mary’s mother and father were both famous novelists themselves.

Move to Italy

Mary, Percy and Claire all moved to Italy in 1818, so that Percy could avoid debtor’s prison. Mary had three more children with Percy, but two of them died very young. Only one of them survived, and she called him Percy – just to make life difficult for biographers and six-minute-summarisers.

Mary did not have a happy time in Italy. While she was grieving the deaths of her children she had to put up with her husband chasing after other women (Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, Jane Williams – just to name a few). Supposedly, Mary and Percy had agreed that their marriage was non-exclusive, but the tone of her diaries and letters seems to tell a different story. In 1819, Percy registered a child as Mary’s, but it certainly wasn’t hers: historians think it may have been his by another woman (maybe Elise Foggi, maybe Claire Clairmont, maybe someone else), or that it was Byron’s (the stats are in his favour). Sadly, this adopted child also died very young.

To add to this depressing sequence of events, Mary miscarried again in 1822. This time she nearly died from blood loss – and although Percy supposedly saved her life, he also abandoned her while she grieved and recovered, going off to “meet” a woman named Jane Williams, the wife of one of his best friends. He wasn’t that secretive about it, either; most of his poems from that summer are about Jane, not Mary.

However, Percy’s summer was cut short by the ultimate rustication: his death. He and Edward Williams (Jane’s husband) were out sailing his new boat when a storm descended, and both of them drowned. Mary stayed with another of Percy’s friends for a year, then returned to England to live with her father and stepsister. She endeavoured to make a living from her writing, but could only afford her own house when Percy’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, agreed to pay a limited annual allowance to his grandson under the condition that Mary never published a biography of Percy. A few years later, Harriet’s son died, and Mary’s son became the legal heir to the Shelley estate. At this point, Sir Timothy agreed to up her allowance – but he refused to communicate with her directly, and sent all correspondence via lawyers.

Later life

When Mary was widowed, she was only 25. From then on, she made a living by writing novels, editing Percy’s poems, and accepting money from Percy’s wealthy father. Her promotion of Percy’s work led to him becoming well regarded and admired, which he never managed in his lifetime. Mary doted on her son, and moved to Harrow so that he could go to school there without having to pay the boarding fees. Sir Timothy lived until he was 90, at which point Mary’s son inherited the estate and became financially independent. She moved into the Shelley’s ancestral home, and lived there with her son and his wife until she died in 1851, at the age of 53, from a suspected brain tumour.

The first science fiction?

Mary Shelley’s most famous work is Frankenstein, written when she was 20. The book has remained hugely popular ever since it was published, and is commonly regarded as the first science fiction. It has elements of Gothic fiction that were common in the early 19^th century, such as the visceral descriptions (much tamer than the stuff we read today, it has to be said), but the novel is really about the struggles of the protagonist, who creates technology that gives him more power than he bargained for. Mary Shelley invented the mad scientist trope, and people love it to this day.

Her later novel, The Last Man, is much less famous, but even more science fiction. It is set in 2073, after a pandemic has wiped out nearly all of humanity. Unlike Frankenstein, this novel was critically panned at the time, possibly because it painted such a bleak picture of the future, and emphasized that humans are just insignificant specks in an uncaring universe. Critics described her imagination as “diseased” – and only very recently, after the recent pandemic, has it started gaining praise.

In summary…

Mary Shelley had an incredibly turbulent adolescence, during which time she had an affair with a married man, wrote one of the most famous and influential novels of all time, travelled all around Europe, suffered the loss of three children, put up with an absent and troubled husband, then lost the husband too. It’s astounding what she achieved given the circumstances, and she deserves more recognition.

(If you’re interested, you can my review of Frankenstein, or my two-part discussion on the definition of science fiction.)