Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

From Philosopedia

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851)

Shelley, best known for her science-fiction novel, Frankenstein (1818), was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (who must have marveled at the creature he, who had a doctorate, had created).

Her mother, noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, married Godwin in March 1797, and Mary was born soon afterwards. The baby was healthy, but the placenta was retained in the womb. The attempt to remove the placenta resulted in blood poisoning, and the mother died on 10 September 1797.

Like her husband Percy, whom she had married after his first wife Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself, Shelley was a freethinking deist, an early example of a female who had no compunction about admitting she was an unbeliever. A prominent social reformer and feminist, she and Shelley had one child, Percy Florence Shelley.

Sara A. Underwood has supplied details about the unusual life the Shelleys led:

• In 1814, Shelley, not yet separated from his first wife, meeting Mary at the grave of her mother, whither she often fled to escape the scoldings of her step-mother, declared his love for her. The scene, their peculiar circumstances, their daring faith in each other, their youth, their beauty, made for them a romance which was irresistible. On the 14th of July, Harriet, Shelley’s wife, came to London, and Godwin called on her and endeavored to reconcile Shelley to her, not dreaming of the drama going on under his own roof. On the 28th of July, Mary Godwin, aided, abetted, and accompanied by her step-mother’s daughter, Jane Claremont, ran away with Shelley. Mrs. Godwin pursued the party, but could not make them return. Godwin held little or no communication with them until the death of Shelley’s first wife, and their legal marriage. ‘The three,’ says K. Paul in his biography of Godwin, ‘went to Paris, where they bought a donkey and rode him in turn to Geneva, the others walking. He was bought for Mary, as the weakest of the party, but Shelley’s feet were soon blistered, and he was glad to ride now and then, not without the jeers of the passersby. Sleeping now in a cabaret, and now in a cottage, they at last finished the strange honeymoon, and the strangest sentimental journey ever undertaken since Adam and Eve.

When the first Mrs. Shelley drowned herself in 1817, Shelley had hastened home to England to claim the two children of his first marriage. Mr. Westerbrook, the children’s maternal grandfather, however, refused him the custody, and the claims of the father were set aside on the grounds of his “infidelity,” whereupon the children “were sent to be educated in a clergyman’s family, the more surely to save them from any hereditary taint of skepticism.” Death, however, “stilled the hearts of the two eldest of their little children, who had grown so dear to them: taking first William, and then Clara, only the youngest, named for his father, Percy, remaining to them.”

One evening when Lord Byron visited them at their Italian villa, only Byron, Polidori, Shelley, and Mary being present, the subject of ghosts, goblins, and wraiths came up. Underwood adds,

• The subject had a weird fascination for those poetic, mystic natures, and it held them with its half-defined sense of the horrible until far into the night. As they at last rose to retire, Byron in one of his sudden impulses, said, "Let us each write a ghost story!’ All eagerly agreed, and made a compact there and then to do so. No one was to see any part of the others’ manuscript, will all were completed. Like most sudden compacts of the kind, it was only partly carried out.

Mary, who having been brought up in Scotland, the land of “bogles,” “brownies,” and witchcraft, and despite her father’s philosophic teachings had an interest in the “uncanny.” Although the others never carried out the compact, Shelley was delighted with his wife’s specimen, in which Victor Frankenstein says, “With how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries”; and “For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a Creator toward his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.”

Colin McCall has pointed out that the 1935 film, Bride of Frankenstein, contained an unfortunate prologue in which Mary Shelley tells her husband and Byron, “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” Nonsense, McCall rejoinders! “Mary Shelley’s ‘monster’ was ‘fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy’; he becomes violent because he is rejected. ‘I am malicious,’ he says, ‘because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?’ ”

Stephen Jay Gould has noted out that Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his preface to Frankenstein, “had, in order to justify Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment, alluded to Erasmus Darwin’s atheistical view on the possibility of quickening matter by electricity.” Gould in his Dinosaur in a Haystack says of the monster that his misery arises “from the moral failure of other humans, not from his own inherent and unchangeable constitution.”

Shelley wrote six novels, five volumes of biographical essays, two “mythological dramas” in verse, a score of short stories, and two volumes of engaging travelogue, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). In 1997 the British biographer Claire Tomalin came across a handbound manuscript of a long-lost story that Shelley had written for Lady Mountcashell’s daughter Laurette, a thirty-nine page happy children’s story that had lain forgotten for over 170 years.

Tomb containing three generations of the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley family

Upon Mary’s death from brain cancer, what was said to be her husband Percy’s heart was found wrapped in her copy of Adonais—however, some skeptics believe the salvaged organ was more likely Shelley’s liver. Although she had wanted to repose in Rome next to her husband, she was buried in the family vault at St. Peter’s church in Bournemouth, along with her husband’s heart, or liver, and their son (Sir Percy Florence Shelley). Also buried there are her parents (William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who were moved from Old St. Pancras in London). Toward the end of her life, she became somewhat interested in religion.

(See entries for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and for Cloning.)

{CB; CE; Stephen Jay Gould, “Why Darwin?” New York Review of Books, 4 April 1996; Richard Holmes, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999; JMR; RAT; SAU; TSV; TYD}