Mary Shelley: Achieving Excellence Through Her Sorrows

Influenced greatly by her mother and father, two of the greatest radical literary writers of the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley was predestined to be equally as moving and thought provoking as her parents. The death of her mother at her birth and Mary’s tumultuous, unhappy childhood thereafter, and trying to find comfort in the distraught father and wretched step-mother who excluded her, fueled the sorrowful yet powerful tone for many of her fictions. The lack of a nuclear, loving family compelled Mary to desire the life of those who had what her family was unpredictable in giving. Shelley’s longing for emotional happiness and strength forged its way into her novels as underlying themes; she also stigmatized the negative impact on what happens to those unwilling to show such emotion (Mellor xii). Her most famous novel, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, is the prime example of her depressing life. In it, she discussed what happened to those who had extremely unappreciative versus understanding parents and how their lives were thus affected. Mary’s father’s dismissal of her in her early teenage years, only to please her wretched step-mother, further

Mary’s marriage to Percy, six months after her waking dream, was sadly short lived when he died onboard ship in a storm less than six years later. Although deeply disheartened by his death, he still remained in her heart and acted as an extreme inspiration to the rest of Mary’s fictions along with Lord Byron, Samuel Coleridge, and still her parents (Woodbridge Desire to Acquire Knowledge). As stated by Frederick Shilstone, without Percy’s influence in her life, Mary could not have published other fictions, Valperga in 1823; The Last Man in 1826; Lodore in 1835, which allowed her to support herself and her only surviving child, Percy Florence.

Godwin’s marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont, although a plague to Mary, would provoke the strong themes in her profound works later on in her life. Mary then had two step siblings, Jane Clairmont, who was later called Claire, and Charles Clairmont in addition to her older half sister Fanny Imlay Godwin. Although Mary was considerably more advance in intelligence than her siblings, “the only formal teaching she received, however, was from Mr. Benson the music master who gave the children weekly half-hour lessons in singing and reading music”(11) Mellor states. Even with a poor formal education, Mary still was allowed to read books from her father’s expansive library and published her first work in 1808 unparallel to the normal capabilities of an eleven year old girl. Her lengthened poem of a song called “Mounseer Nongtongpaw” by Charles Didbin was so popular it was republished twenty-two years later in an illustrated edition (Mellor 10). Mrs. Godwin, extremely jealous of Mary’s superior intelligence over Mrs. Godwin’s won educated children, bitterly stated ‘“Jane might be well educated, but Mary could stay at home and mend the stockings’”(Mellor 13). Mary Jane’s wicked torment and raging jealousy of Mary’s relationship with Mary’s own father compelled Mary Jane to put an end to the relationship. Mrs. Godwin, becoming increasingly successful at distancing her husband from his only biological daughter, finally succeeded when “Godwin promptly sent her off on June 7”(Mellor 15) to Scotland a few months before her fifteenth birthday in 1812.

depressed the young writer. Her disconnected adolescence and the questionable morality of her actions as an adult provided source for many novels she wrote, rousing contempt from some of her contemporaries and praise from others. Without the hardships of her childhood, periodic depressions, and support and encouragement from her husband, Percy Shelley, Mary would not have been capable of producing such a thought provoking, intellectual novel as Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died at the age of fifty three in 1851 and was buried between the transferred remains of her mother

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