Mary Shelley

The daughter of two famous parents

Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding argument in English that women are not born inferior but educated into looking so. Her father was William Godwin, a political philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) argued that government itself corrupts, and who was, for a few years, the most notorious thinker in Britain. They married in March 1797. Mary was born on 30 August; her mother died of an infection eleven days later, and the daughter grew up reading the dead woman's books and visiting her grave.

Godwin remarried in 1801, to a widow named Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought a daughter of her own into the house: Claire Clairmont, almost exactly Mary's age, who becomes the third figure in everything that follows. The household was poor, bookish and full of visitors, and Mary's education came from it rather than from any school. Among the young admirers who came to sit at Godwin's feet was Percy Bysshe Shelley — heir to a baronetcy and to the family estate that went with the hereditary title, expelled from Oxford at eighteen for printing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism and refusing to disown it, a poet, and already married to a woman called Harriet Westbrook. In the summer of 1814 he and Mary, then sixteen, declared themselves to each other at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St Pancras churchyard.

Calais, Paris, and the donkey

They left before dawn on 28 July 1814 — Mary, Percy and Claire — on what their book records as a hotter day than has been known in this climate for many years. Rather than wait for the packet boat at Dover — the scheduled cross-Channel sailing that carried mail and passengers to Calais — they hired a small vessel that evening, and the crossing that had been promised in two hours took all night in a violent wind. They reached Calais in the morning, stayed there that day and most of the next, and arrived in Paris, in the book's own words, the next day about two.

Paris then held them still. Nobody would let rooms by the day, so they were obliged to engage apartments at an hotel for a week: a bedchamber, a closet with a bed in it and an antechamber they used as a sitting room, expensive and disappointing, and so hot that they mostly stayed indoors. Percy's expected money did not come. The book calls the week a kind of imprisonment, and it ended only when a small remittance arrived and set them free.

Their solution to the next stage was not a carriage. They decided to buy an ass — a donkey — to carry the luggage and, by turns, one of them; Percy and Claire went to the ass market and bought it. They packed a few necessaries, sent the rest by the diligence, which was the public stagecoach, and left the hotel door in a fiacre, a hired cab, with the little ass following behind. The donkey turned out to be too weak to carry a person at all, so they sold it and bought a mule for ten Napoleons, the gold twenty-franc coins that still carried the deposed emperor's head.

South-east of Paris the walk stopped being a lark. At Nogent-sur-Seine they found a town, in the book's spelling, entirely desolated by the Cossacs — the Cossacks, the Russian cavalry of the allied armies that had crossed France that spring and forced Napoleon's abdication in April. Houses had been burned, cattle killed and every kind of property destroyed. At the village of Echemine they found cottages without roofs and blackened beams, and inhabitants who did not yet know that Napoleon had been deposed, because news travelled between French towns more slowly than three young English travellers on foot. They kept going through Troyes and on into Switzerland, reached Brunnen on the Lake of Lucerne on 23 August with twenty-eight pounds between them and nothing more due until December, and turned round almost at once — home by water, down the Reuss and the Rhine and out through Germany and Holland, because it was cheaper. The whole excursion took six weeks.

History of a Six Weeks' Tour

In 1817 the journal Mary had kept of that runaway summer was published, together with letters from a second Swiss journey and a long poem of Percy's, as History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. It appeared anonymously. It is a small book and an odd one — part travel diary, part complaint about French inns, part reportage from a countryside that had just been an invasion route — and it is the earliest published writing of hers we have. The Paris chapter of it is the only sustained account she ever wrote of the city.

France was crossed again in May 1816, by the same three people, on the way to Lake Geneva. That second crossing produced the letters printed at the back of the same book, and it delivered Mary to the summer that made her famous.

The Geneva summer of 1816

Claire Clairmont had begun an affair with Lord Byron in London, and it was she who steered the party towards Lake Geneva, where Byron had taken the Villa Diodati. Byron was then the most famous poet in Europe and had just left England in the middle of a marital scandal — his wife had walked out after a year, and London was repeating a rumour that he had slept with his half-sister — and he never set foot in the country again; travelling with him was his young physician, John William Polidori. The Shelleys took a smaller house a few minutes' walk below the villa, and the two households spent the evenings together.

The weather refused to behave. The eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies — the volcano on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia, whose explosion in April 1815 was the largest in recorded history — had thrown enough ash into the atmosphere to chill the whole northern hemisphere, and 1816 is still called the year without a summer: rain, cold and darkness across Europe through June. Kept indoors, the party read German ghost stories aloud, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. Polidori's became The Vampyre, the story that put the suave aristocratic bloodsucker into English fiction and pointed straight at Bram Stoker's Dracula nearly eighty years later. Mary, eighteen, could think of nothing for days, and then arrived at her question: what if a man assembled a living human being out of dead body parts, and then had to live with it?

The story she began as a competition entry grew into a novel. Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy, builds a creature out of pieces of the dead and animates it, then flees from what he has made; the creature, intelligent, articulate and rejected by everyone who sees it, sets out to destroy him. The book has been read ever since as a warning about scientific ambition without responsibility, and it is usually named as the first science-fiction novel — a book that gets its terror not from a ghost but from a laboratory.

Frankenstein in print

Percy Shelley's first wife Harriet drowned herself in December 1816, and Mary and Percy married at the end of that month. Frankenstein was published in London in three volumes on New Year's Day 1818 by the publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, without its author's name on the title page. It was dedicated to William Godwin and carried a preface written by Percy, and a good many reviewers therefore assumed the novel was Percy's. Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in London in 1823 on the back of a hit stage version, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which packed a London theatre that summer and which she went to see herself.

In 1831 she revised the book heavily for a cheap one-volume reissue with illustrations, including the plate of the creature waking that fixed the monster's image for the next two centuries, and she added an introduction telling the Diodati story for the first time in public. The 1818 and 1831 texts differ enough that scholars choose between them; the earlier one is bleaker about free will, the later one gentler on Victor. Both are in print today, and the manuscript notebooks she wrote the first version in are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, digitised in the Shelley-Godwin Archive, the free online edition of the family's handwritten papers.

Widow, editor, and the long second half

The years after Geneva were brutal. Two of the couple's children died within nine months of each other in Italy — Clara in 1818, William in 1819 — and a third had died in infancy in 1815; only Percy Florence, born in 1819, survived to adulthood. On 8 July 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat went down in a squall in the Gulf of Spezia, off the Italian coast. He was twenty-nine. Mary was twenty-four, and she had another twenty-nine years to live.

She spent a great deal of them building her husband's reputation. She assembled and published his Posthumous Poems in 1824, and Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, forced the edition to be withdrawn and threatened to cut off her allowance if she printed the name again. She waited him out, and in 1839 brought out The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley with her own notes attached to each year of his life — the notes that shaped how the nineteenth century read him, and that a modern editor still has to argue with.

She was also, all this time, working for money as a novelist and a professional writer. Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) — a plague novel that empties the world of everyone but its narrator — Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) followed Frankenstein, along with biographical articles written to order. In the 1840s she went back across France with her son Percy Florence and his friends, and turned the journeys into Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), her last book. She died in London on 1 February 1851, at fifty-three, of what was probably a brain tumour. Among her things her son found a package that had been in her desk for nearly thirty years. When Percy Shelley's body washed ashore in 1822 the quarantine laws required it to be burned where it lay, and his friends built a pyre on the beach at Viareggio; one of them snatched from the fire what was left of the heart, and it came to Mary. That is what was in the package.