Difficult Women: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

But the monsters turned out to be just trees

Mary Shelley painted by Richard Rothwell

We rarely acknowledge the life of Mary Shelley before she wrote "Frankenstein" — nor the life she lived after its publication. Today, 207 years later, her name is synonymous with the monster at her story’s center, familiar to international audiences thanks to numerous films, Halloween costumes, parodies, and more.

But as a person, what do we really know about Mary herself?

Let’s begin with what we know for sure. Her father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher and free-thinker. Mary was born in 1797 as Mary Godwin, named after her mother, feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth. Our Mary was still Mary Godwin when she began writing the book that would become "Frankenstein" — a book initially published anonymously. However, by then, she had changed her surname to match that of her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley was a girl and a woman surrounded by creative and inspiring people, each of whom saw and respected her for her greatness. Yet for most of the time between the 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" and the book’s 207th anniversary this year, Mary has remained a cipher in her own narrative.

The first and arguably best-known film portrayal of Mary herself was Elsa Lancaster in the 1932 film "Bride of Frankenstein." Though the bulk of the film offers an imagined sequel to Mary’s novel, its opening scene brings to life the now-infamous dark and stormy night upon which she began to imagine the story of a hubristic scientist and his tragic creation. Lancaster, who also portrays the titular Bride, is winsome and spritely in a way Mary almost definitely wouldn’t have been at that time. The 18-year-old Mary had already suffered the loss of one infant child and was still nursing a new baby. A poorly devised vegetarian diet kept her energy low and exacerbated her naturally anxious disposition. As she explained in the foreword to a later release of the book, Lord Byron’s writing prompt came when he and his travel companions were becoming stir-crazy from an overly long holiday during a freak weather occurrence that plunged them into an endless winter. On this night, Mary was likely also tired of the company of her stepsister, Claire, an ongoing third wheel in her relationship with Shelley.

We know now that the work Mary begins to dream up that evening will become an instant hit, one still familiar even to young children today. Shortly after its publication, theatre companies began adapting the book (without Mary’s permission), and the story took on a life of its own. Despite or perhaps because of a spate of tragedy — the death of another of her young children, her half-sister’s death by suicide, Percy’s death in a freak drowning accident — Mary continued writing both privately and publicly.

In the decades following "Frankenstein"’s publication, she produced numerous essays and articles, book reviews, biographies, and four other standalone novels. She could not support herself and her family through writing and spent many years supported by her late husband’s wealthy parents. But she never stopped pitching work to publishers, nor did she tire of advocating to increase her late husband’s profile as an author. After his death, Mary carefully sorted and edited his previously unpublished work, helping to solidify his status in the canon of English literature — even as her gender and reputation prevented her star from rising.

Despite Mary’s literary pedigree, she was often dismissed as a dilettante. That "Frankenstein" had been first published anonymously but featured a prologue by Percy continued to lead people to suspect it was he, and not Mary, who had written the novel itself. "Frankenstein" is a great novel: well-written, genre-defining, captivating audiences even centuries later. To admit that it was drafted by an 18-year-old girl and later published by a 20-year-old woman is too great a challenge to some critics and readers even today.

But Mary had a life before "Frankenstein," and continued to live for nearly 30 years after its publication. That Mary persisted in her creative endeavours is admirable. That she continued producing increasingly skilled and thought-provoking work for almost 30 years is phenomenal.

Of her early life, we know only the pieces she chose to share later on. For unknown reasons, most of her childhood writing seems to have been intentionally destroyed, while the letters and diaries she decided to keep were lost during a trip to France. But she left behind a few glimpses into her life, like how her tendency to repress her feelings led to a toxic relationship with her stepfamily and how she developed such debilitating physical symptoms from anxiety that she was sent to Scotland to recuperate.

We know that she first encountered Shelley, who had been in her home as a colleague of her father’s, after returning from this recovery. We know that she was both surprised and confused to find herself shunned by polite society and her ostensibly free-thinking father for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock with a man married to someone else. We know that she felt her life’s tragedies were a form of karmic retribution for Shelley’s first wife’s death by suicide; how, after Percy’s dead body was pulled from the waters after his drowning, she battled with the poet Leigh Hunt over which of them would be able to keep his embalmed heart; and how that heart was purportedly kept in her desk until her death.

What we forget about Mary Shelley is what can so often be forgotten about any woman from the past: that she was a whole person, not just someone’s daughter or wife. She was not just the author of "Frankenstein," and she was also not just an author. Mary Shelley was a girl who never knew her mother, whose upbringing left her so anxious her body rebelled against her. She was a woman who was widowed at 24, who lost three young children, who lived in near-poverty as others profited off of her intellectual property. She was a woman chased by tragedy, lost in the shadows whose most famous book continues to be relevant today. Her name is widely known, even if her personal story is not.

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VULGAR HISTORY A LA CARTE is the companion publication to the Vulgar History podcast. Click here to hear the latest episode of the podcast.

Ann Foster is a a writer and podcaster. She’s currently writing a nonfiction biography of Caroline of Brunswick. Don’t know who that is? You will soon! She’s represented by Amy Bishop-Wycisk at Trellis Literary Management.

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Reference:

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

A previous version of this article was published in 2018 on Shondaland.com