Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), née Godwin, was born on this day 30 August 1797, she was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered to be an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Both her parents were regarded as extraordinary, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, published the classic manifesto of sexual equality, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her father, William Godwin, established his pre-eminence in radical British political thought with his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and won a permanent place in literary history with his novel Caleb Williams (1794), often considered the first English detective novel. Sadly, Shelley’s mother died less than a month after giving birth to her and she was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Shelley came to have a troubled relationship, she sent the teenaged Mary to Scotland in 1812, ostensibly for her health. In addition to further isolating her from the father she loved, the two years in Scotland nurtured Mary’s literary imagination.
In 1814, at the age of 17, she began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Shelley was pregnant with Percy’s child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced difficult times, ostracised from society, debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple and her stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio, he was only 29.
A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.
Here is a poem by her, perhaps written after her husbands death:
Let's Write...... 