Her mother died giving birth to her. At 16, she ran away with a married poet. At 18, she wrote Frankenstein. By 24, she'd lost her husband and three of her four children.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, into what should have been an ideal life.
Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminist philosophers, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a radical argument that women deserved education and equality. Her father, William Godwin, was a prominent political philosopher whose ideas about justice and social reform influenced an entire generation of thinkers.
Mary was born into intellectual royalty, the daughter of two people who believed humanity could be perfected through reason and education.
Eleven days after giving birth to her, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicemia.
Mary grew up in her father's house, surrounded by books and visited by the greatest minds of the era—poets, philosophers, political radicals. But she also grew up without a mother, raised partly by her father and partly by a stepmother who resented her and favored her own children.
Mary spent hours in the cemetery where her mother was buried, reading beside the gravestone, learning to write by tracing the letters of her mother's name. She educated herself through her father's extensive library, reading philosophy, political theory, and literature that most girls of her era never encountered.
By fourteen, she was intellectually precocious, emotionally intense, and desperate to prove herself worthy of her mother's legacy.
In 1814, when Mary was sixteen, a young poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley began visiting her father's house. Percy was twenty-one, brilliant, radical, and already married with a pregnant wife. He was also a devoted follower of William Godwin's philosophy and had come seeking the great man's guidance.
Instead, he fell in love with Godwin's daughter.
Mary and Percy began meeting secretly in the cemetery where Mary's mother was buried. They read poetry together. They talked about philosophy, politics, and their dreams of changing the world. They fell desperately in love.
Percy was married to Harriet Westbrook, but the marriage was unhappy and he considered it essentially over. Mary, at sixteen, believed in the radical idea that love should be free, that marriage was an artificial constraint, that two souls recognizing each other should be enough.
In July 1814, Mary and Percy eloped to Continental Europe, taking Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont with them.
The scandal was immediate and devastating. Mary's father—the philosopher who had written about free love and the tyranny of marriage—disowned her for running away with a married man. Society shunned her. Percy's family cut him off financially.
Mary was sixteen years old, pregnant, living in poverty across Europe with a married man, and completely cut off from her family.
In February 1815, she gave birth to a daughter two months premature. The baby died two weeks later, unnamed.
Mary fell into depression. But she was also beginning to write—keeping journals, composing stories, developing her voice as a writer.
In January 1816, she gave birth to a son, William. That summer, she and Percy traveled to Switzerland to spend time with Lord Byron, the famous poet, at his rented villa near Lake Geneva.
The summer of 1816 became legendary in literary history.
The group at Villa Diodati included Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, Mary's stepsister Claire (who was pregnant with Byron's child), and Dr. John Polidori, Byron's physician. The weather was terrible—constant rain and storms caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year, which had created a "year without a summer."
Trapped indoors, they entertained themselves by reading German ghost stories aloud. One night, Byron challenged everyone to write their own supernatural tale.
Mary struggled at first. She was only eighteen, surrounded by established poets and intellectuals. What could she create that would measure up?
Then, one night, she had a waking dream. She envisioned a scientist kneeling beside a creature he had assembled, watching in horror as it came to life. The image was so vivid, so terrifying, that she began writing immediately.
Over the following months, she expanded that vision into Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The novel told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who creates life from dead tissue, only to abandon his creation in horror when he sees what he has made. The creature, intelligent and sensitive but hideous and rejected, becomes a monster not because of what he is but because of how he's treated.
It was brilliant—a story about creation, responsibility, rejection, and what it means to be human. It drew on contemporary scientific debates about electricity and reanimation. It explored questions of parenthood and abandonment. It was Gothic horror and philosophical novel and science fiction all at once.
Mary was eighteen years old when she wrote it.
Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, with a preface written by Percy. Many readers assumed Percy had written it—surely this profound, disturbing novel couldn't have been written by a teenage girl?
But it was. And it immediately became a sensation.
While Mary was creating one of literature's most enduring works, her life was falling apart.
In 1816, Percy's wife Harriet—abandoned, pregnant, and desperate—drowned herself in the Serpentine in London. Her body was found weeks later. She was twenty-one years old.
Percy and Mary were finally able to marry in December 1816. But the marriage that had begun as passionate rebellion became marked by tragedy.
In 1818, Mary and Percy moved to Italy, partly to escape the scandal surrounding Harriet's death, partly for Percy's health, partly because they had no money and life was cheaper there.
Their daughter Clara died in Venice in September 1818. She was one year old.
Their son William died in Rome in June 1819. He was three years old.
Mary, at twenty-one, had lost three of her four children. She fell into a depression so severe that Percy worried she might not survive. Their marriage, already strained by financial problems and Percy's emotional distance, became increasingly difficult.
In 1822, while sailing off the coast of Viareggio, Italy, Percy Shelley's boat was caught in a sudden storm. He drowned. He was twenty-nine years old.
His body washed ashore days later. His friends cremated him on the beach. Mary kept his heart, which had somehow survived the cremation, wrapped in a page of his poetry.
At twenty-four years old, Mary Shelley was a widow with one surviving child—Percy Florence, born in 1819. She had published one of the most important novels in English literature. She had lost her mother at birth, been disowned by her father, lost three children and her husband.
She could have given up. Many women in her situation would have.
Instead, she returned to England and became a professional writer.
For the next thirty years, Mary supported herself and her son entirely through writing. She wrote five more novels, including The Last Man (1826), one of the first post-apocalyptic novels ever written. She wrote short stories, travelogues, and biographical essays. She edited and published Percy's poetry and prose, working tirelessly to establish his literary reputation.
She negotiated with Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, for financial support for her son while maintaining her independence and dignity. She raised Percy Florence into a respectable, educated man who eventually inherited the Shelley baronetcy.
She lived to see Frankenstein staged as a play, inspiring countless adaptations. She watched as her creation—the tragic monster she had dreamed up at eighteen during a rainy summer in Switzerland—became part of the cultural imagination.
Mary Shelley died on February 1, 1851, at age fifty-three, from a brain tumor. She lived long enough to see the Victorian era begin, long enough to witness the early stages of the Industrial Revolution that her novel had anticipated and warned against.
When they opened her desk after her death, they found Percy's heart, still wrapped in poetry, still kept close after nearly thirty years.
At 16, she ran away with a married poet. At 18, she wrote Frankenstein during a dark summer in Switzerland. By 24, she'd buried her husband and three children—then supported herself as a writer for 30 more years.
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