Five Facts: Mary Shelley - Overshadowed Mother of Sci-Fi

Yay! Another last-minute history blog post on the last day of the month. Forgive me this time. I went on a boating holiday. It played havoc with my inner ear, and I’ve developed vertigo.

Anyway, I’ve managed to put together this short post about Mary Shelley, who was born on 30th August, two hundred and twenty-five years ago (1797).

And Shelley, forfam’d,- for her parents, her lord,

And the poor lone impossible monster abhorr’d.
Leigh Hunt, “The Blue-Stocking Revels”

This quote helps to explain my choice of title, for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, nee Godwin, was a woman who has been overshadowed by her famous parents, and husband.

However, she deserves to be recognised in her own right as a skilled editor and critic, influential travel writer, and novelist.

Here are five facts about Mary Shelley:

Her family life was unhappy. She is the daughter of William Godwin, a political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher, and early feminist. Unfortunately, her mother died only two weeks after giving birth to Mary. When Godwin re-married, his new wife, Mary Clairmont, tried to alienate Mary from her father, and they never got along.
She was a radical. Her father encouraged her to follow his radical political thinking. However, her later writing suggests that she believed in cooperation and understanding as the basis for improving society rather than individualism, as advocated by her father and husband.
Life with Shelley was far from romantic. When Mary met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812, she was fourteen, and he was already married. They eloped in 1814, were ostracised by society, and spent their time travelling across Europe and evading their creditors. They eventually married in 1816 after Shelley’s first wife committed suicide.
She suffered from depression. Unsurprisingly, she was plagued by periods of depression. As mentioned above, she did not know her mother, had a terrible relationship with her stepmother and endured a marriage of financial struggles and infidelity. This is not a fact, but it has been suggested that her husband’s advocacy of free love also encouraged Mary to dabble in affairs with his friends. She had to deal with a lot of tragedy, including the suicide of her half-sister in 1816, and the death of all her children save one, Percy Florence Shelley. To top it off, she became a widow at twenty-four after Shelley died in a boating accident.
Frankenstein was only one of her novels. Frankenstein, argued to be the first science fiction novel, was famously created during the year without a summer (1816 – when a volcano in Indonesia erupted and a layer of ash in the atmosphere led to dark skies and rain across the globe), while staying with Lord Byron in Italy. Their group devised a contest to write a horror story on a stormy night. As well as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley also wrote historical novels, and an apocalyptic novel called The Last Man (1826) about the future destruction of man by plague. The Last Man has been argued to be her best work. Her travel writing is also believed to be some of the finest in the genre.