I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
As a literature major, I have spent my (almost) first year drifting through the seas of words spun by the hands of the greats. Yet, few figures have ever pulled at my soul the way Mary Shelley has. When I first set out to study her life, I expected to find brilliance. What I uncovered was a labyrinth of tragedy, passion, rebellion, and breathtaking loneliness—threaded together by a mind that refused to surrender to despair.
Mary Godwin was born into a cradle of revolution and intellect. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a titan of early feminist thought, daring to pen A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher whose ideas of free love and political justice shook the foundations of his time. But Mary’s life began under a cruel star: her mother died just days after her birth, leaving behind a chasm Mary would spend her life trying to cross. William Godwin, hysterical and sorrowful, remarried a woman who was far less enamoured with the chaos of this genius. Mary grew up under the strict gaze of her stepmother, with her stepsister Claire Clairmont—a creature of wild ambition and fevered dreams—as her only true companion. Claire would, in time, mirror Mary’s own maladies, pursuing dangerous loves and meeting a similar, rather tragic fate.
Mary found solace where the world failed her: in books, in the whispering trees of St. Pancras churchyard, and in the imagined conversations with the mother she never knew. Her education was unorthodox and her mind burned with an unyielding, secret fire. It was there, amid the shadows of the past, that she first encountered Percy Bysshe Shelley—an encounter that would ignite the brightest and most ruinous love of her life.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Percy was a poet of reckless spirit, already entangled in a marriage to Harriet Westbrook, a young woman he had married to rescue from despair but had long since abandoned emotionally. Mary, not yet seventeen, surrendered her heart to him. Beneath her mother’s grave, she surrendered to Percy, stepping into a tempest of forbidden love. Their flight from England was a scandal, setting tongues wagging and bridges burning. Yet fate’s cruelty was not yet spent: Harriet, broken by abandonment and despair, threw herself into the Serpentine River, ending her life and leaving behind the children she bore Percy. Though he fought for custody, the courts deemed him too unfit and immoral to raise them. Through these storms, Mary and Percy clung to each other, weaving a life of exile, passion, and literary dream. They roamed Europe with Claire, who herself became entangled with Lord Byron—another dark star whose gravity shaped the trajectory of their lives. One fateful summer by Lake Geneva, amid rain-drenched nights and ghost stories, Byron challenged each guest to write a tale of horror. From the black marrow of grief and genius, Mary conjured Frankenstein—a creature stitched from death, aching for love and belonging, much like herself.
I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me. I am malicious because I am miserable
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Frankenstein did not merely birth a story; it sparked a genre. Mary Godwin at the age of 18 introduced the world to the genre of Science Fiction as Frankenstein is said to be the first novel in this genre. Mary Shelley, in her tender youth, became a pioneer of Gothic and feminist literature, asking questions that still rattle the soul: What does it mean to create life? What are the responsibilities of a parent—or a society—to its children? She pulled many of these aching questions from her strained, distant relationship with her father, William Godwin, who had drifted from her like a ghost.
But the life Mary built with Percy was destined to crumble. Their love was a house built on sand, battered by death after death: they lost three of their four children to illness and miscarriage. Then, in 1822, came the final blow. Percy, sailing his small boat Don Juan across the Ligurian Sea, was caught in a sudden storm and drowned. When his body washed ashore, it was nearly unrecognisable—except for the volume of Keats’ poetry found in his pocket.
I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Mary was only 24 years old, but she had lived several lifetimes of walking down the same endless staircase of grief.
After Percy’s death, Mary turned to her pen as her sword. She worked tirelessly to preserve Percy’s legacy, editing his posthumous works, and wrote novels of her own—The Last Man, Valperga, and others—that spoke of isolation, desolation, and an endless search for meaning— all delicately laced with whispers of impending doom. Though she remained a figure on the edges of literary society, she raised her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, with unyielding devotion and commitment.
The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s life was stitched together from the rags of tragedy and the brilliant silk of genius. Until her death at the age of 53, she carried with her a relic of the man she had loved beyond all reason: Percy’s heart, calcified from the pyre, wrapped tenderly in one of his last poems, and hidden in her desk drawer—the same desk where she continued to write, her pen gliding across the page like whispers floating from the other side.
My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free
Mary Shelley
In the end, Mary Shelley lived as a ghost among the living, her soul stitched with melancholy and brilliance, and died as she wrote: haunted, luminous, and unforgettable.
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