“I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” So wrote Mary Shelley about Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). It was her debut novel, and it’s now acknowledged as the first work of science fiction – a remarkable achievement for any woman. It has been praised as well as ridiculed, most recently by feminist writer Germaine Greer. It’s often mined for parody – the mad scientist; the mindless, stitched-up creature – even as we ponder its profound question: How far can we progress in science and technology before we cross a moral line?

During those “happy days,” the author was summering in a Swiss villa with friends. Their host, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, started a ghost-story writing competition. Like many Romantic intellectuals, the group often criticized the scientific revolution for overreaching nature. After one late-night discussion, 18-year-old Mary awoke from a nightmare in which a “pale student of unhallowed arts” brought a “hideous phantasm of a man” to life. The story she wrote would far outlive its time.

Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (1840)

A literary family

She was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, 1797, and named after her mother, who died from complications of the birth. Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist pioneer who argued, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), that women were perfectly capable of reason and deserved to be educated like men. William Godwin was a prominent free-thinker and writer who wrote one of the first mystery thrillers. He remarried when his daughter was 3, but she never became close to her stepmother or step-siblings. Young Mary preferred the intellectual company of her father and his friends, who included the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She started writing at age 10, and at 15 went to live in Scotland, which she would remember as the setting of her blossoming imagination.

Romantic love and marriage

When Mary first met Percy Bysshe Shelley, he and his wife Harriet were visiting her parents. He was a radical young poet, an atheist who was estranged from his father and became influenced by Godwin’s philosophy. They met again in May 1814, when his marriage was in trouble and she was sweet sixteen. The poet believed in free love, and by summer’s end Mary had eloped with him. Her father refused to speak to her until they married years later, after the suicide of Harriet, who had refused Percy’s invitation to live with him and Mary. The Shelleys socialized and traveled avidly, frequently staying in Italy. Sadly, that was where their young daughter, their firstborn son, and Percy himself all died. In 1822, only weeks after Mary almost bled to death from a miscarriage, Percy drowned when his boat sank in a sudden storm. He was 29 years old.

A mother and a writer

Grieving, the young widow returned to her father’s home with her surviving son, Percy Florence. Her father-in-law, Sir Timothy, sent only a small allowance for his grandson, and he threatened to stop when a new volume of Shelley’s poetry was published, edited by Mary. Denied this avenue of income, Mary supported herself and her son through her own writing. She was able to send Percy Florence to the prestigious Harrow School, and he went on to enroll at Cambridge. Mary moved around in England, and although she had one or two romances, she never remarried. She continued to tour Europe, twice with her son and his friends, publishing writings on her experiences. She worked so hard that she often fell ill in the last decade of her life. Percy Florence inherited the Shelley estate and the title of Baron at age 25, when his grandfather died. He and his wife cared for Mary in comfort until her last days. She died of brain cancer in London in 1851, only 53 years old.

Mary Shelley’s legacy

The first edition of Shelley’s masterpiece did not name its author, and many readers (including Sir Walter Scott) believed it had been written by her famous husband. But by the publication of The Last Man (1826), the public was eager to read the work of “Mrs. Shelley,” “the author of Frankenstein.” When finally permitted to publish her late husband’s poems, Shelley gave us copious notes on their composition. She remained faithful to the poet’s memory and secured his posthumous fame.

Shelley published two other novels as well as her own poems, plays and stories. She was acclaimed in her lifetime as a travel writer, a literary reviewer, and a composer of biographical profiles for major encyclopedias. She was a hard-working single mother who honed her craft in a successful career while living a modest and solitary life. It seems unlikely that such a quiet person could have created the most enduring monsters in the cultural imagination, but that is what she did. Mary Shelley was a woman ahead of her time.

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