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 Wollstonecraft Shelley died at the age of fifty three in 1851 and was buried between the transferred remains of her mother and gather at St. Peters’ churchyard in Bournemouth, Sussex (Mellor xx). Contempt still powerful among many in the clergy even after her death, Mary’s head stone read only “Author” and “Wife of the Poet” because no “gravestone in a [rector’s] cemetery would bear the inscription ‘Author of Frankenstein’”(Miller 109). Fueled by tales of her mother’s relentless nature and what is called heroism by some for standing up as a woman and also by her father, although mostly in a negative way, Mary Shelley lived a remarkable life despite it being plagued by sorrow. Without the turmoil of her relationships with her family, the stigmas she received from her objectionable marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and jealousy of those who possessed what she desperately wanted, Mary Shelley would not be a name of importance today. Her incredible work, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, is forever growing as a necessity in tracing and exploring the female consciousness and literary technique (Mellor xi). Shelley’s fictions, inspired by her usual bouts of severe depression, allowed the first science fiction to be written and encouraged women in the future to write only what they wanted. After Mary Shelley’s brilliance, no longer did women authors bend their creativity and free will to conform to the ‘perfect’ mold set by society to ensure themselves social acceptance.

Before even marrying Percy Shelley, Mary had two children in the two years and five months they were traveling. One named Clara was born prematurely and died only a few weeks later in March 1815, Shannon Lawson states. Ten months later in January of 1816, Mary’s second son William was born, which dispelled all of Mary’s sadness at losing her first child. Before William died at age three of malaria, Mary had another baby girl on September 1, 1817, who died a year later of a fever. The cruel and sad death of a child is presented in Frankenstein when the William, the youngest sibling of the main character, Victor Frankenstein, is murdered by vicious strangulation, “the print of the murderer’s finger...on his neck”(Shelley 70.) Mary’s fourth and only surviving child, Percy Florence, was born five months after William’s death. Meanwhile, Claire who had been pursuing another married man, Lord Byron, succeeded in becoming his mistress. Claire, Percy, Mary, and baby William traveled to Genoa, Switzerland, to join Lord Byron.

Mary Godwin was born to Mary Wollstonecraft, considered to be the first feminist, and William Godwin, an active atheist in Catholic Europe, on August 30, 1797. Less than two weeks later her mother died of puerperal septicemia, an illness caused by childbirth or abortion in which linings o

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