Analynne Madrid

Per. 6
Mr. Rodriguez
Honors English 2
An Autobiography of Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later known as Mary Shelley, was born in Somers Town,
London, England, on the 30th of August 1797. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a
journalist, philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, educator and feminist philosopher
which was to die only 11 days after her birth, from puerperal fever. She and her four years older
half-sister Fanny Imlay were raised and educated by her father who encouraged them to write
from early age. Mary Shelley became an essayist, biographer, short story writer, and novelist,
famous for her novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, from 1818. Similar to her
mother, Shelley led a complicated private life and suffered much ostracism due to her affair with
the married man Percy Bysshe Shelley, which was later to become her husband. Shelly also lost
three of her children prematurely until the birth of her only surviving child Percy Florence, born
in 1819. Shelley's husband also died prematurely sailing into a storm. Shelley herself died on the
1st of February 1851. When Mary Shelley was four years old, her father married Mary Jane
Clairmont, their neighbor, who had already two children of her own. His new wife was disliked
by most of Godwin's friends and she and Mary did not get along. From an early age, Mary was
encouraged by her father to write letters and she took an early liking to writing. She was also
encouraged to embrace her father's sociopolitical liberal views and theories and was mostly
informally educated, at home. Mary Shelley had access to her father's library, had a governess
and a daily tutor. She was later sent to stay with William Baxter, a known radical, and his family
in Scotland. At the age of fifteen, she was described by her father as "singularly bold, somewhat
imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in
everything she undertakes almost invincible."

In 1814, with seventeen years old, Mary Shelley started a relationship with Percy Bysshe
Shelley, one of her father's political admirers and a married man. Percy was also helping Godwin
financially and, due to his admiration for Godwin's political thought, he was alienated from his
aristocratic surroundings. Percy and Mary Shelley started meeting secretly at her mother's grave
and when her father discovered, he tried to finish the relationship, without success. The couple
travelled to France with Mary's step sister Claire Clairmont and only returned when there was no
money left. Upon their return, Mary Shelley was pregnant and her father, to her surprise, refused
any help. Percy was constantly leaving home, escaping from creditors and also at the time
Percy's wife gave birth to their son and Percy seemed to want Mary Shelley to have an affair
with his friend Hogg. They left to Geneva with Claire Clairmont in 1816, to spend the summer
with Lord Byron, Claire's affair at the time. The bad weather confined them to the house and they
spend much of their time talking about galvanism and reading ghost stories which prompted her
to write the first sketch of what was to become her most famous novel Frankenstein: or The
Modern Prometheus.
Soon after Mary, Percy and Claire returned to England, Mary's sister and Peter's wife
Harriet suicide in the space of two months. Percy was advised by his lawyer to marry Mary
which he did at the end of 1816. In the following year Percy was declared morally unfit by the
Chancery Court and lost custody of his children with his deceased wife Harriet. The Shelley's,
Claire Clairmont and her new baby Alba, daughter of Lord Byron, moved to a large building on
the river Thames, where Shelley gave birth to Clara, her third child. In the same year, once more
afraid of creditors, they all left to Italy without intention of ever returning. After leaving Alba
with Lord Byron, who agreed to raise her with the condition that her mother would have nothing
more to do with her, the group wandered around Italy, socializing, writing, and accumulating
friends that would often travel with them. The lightness of their existence came to an end with
the death of Shelley's two children in 1818 and 1819 which left her devastated and alienated
from her husband. Her spirits only lifted with the arrival of their fourth child, Percy Florence, by
the end of 1819. During their time in Italy, Mary Shelley wrote prolifically, most noticeably the
plays Midas and Proserpine, the novel Matilda, and Valperga, a historical novel, the latter being
written in an attempt to help her father's finances. Mary Shelley had to still cope with her
husband's interests in other women although she had her share of men around her.

The trio moved to Naples and there they were accused by Paolo and Elise Foggi, servants
that they had engaged in Naples, for registering a two-month old baby as Percy's and Shelley's
daughter, when they claimed it was actually Claire's daughter. There has been much speculation
about what actually happened in Naples, without final conclusion. The baby died in the
beginning of 1820.
In 1822 Mary Shelley was pregnant again and they moved to Villa Magni, an isolated
place at the Bay of Lerici. There Claire learned that her daughter Alba had died in a convent at
Bagnacavallo. Mary Shelley was herself depressed in such isolated surroundings, miscarried and
almost died from it. Percy spend more time with his Jane Williams, whom he idolized, than with
his debilitated wife. The other playtime for Percy was a new sailing boat which ended up on
killing him in a storm. Following the death of her husband, Mary Shelley spend much of her time
translating poems by Byron but her finances were in precarious state. She moved back to
England where she stayed first with her father and was later able to live alone, thanks to an
allowance by Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley. They disagreed over her son's education which
made her financial situation complicated yet again. She enjoyed a stimulating social life in the
circles of her father but was still ostracized by many for her relationship with Percy. She moved
to London in 1824 to be close to Jane Williams, with whom she was probably in love with. At
the time she was working on The Last Man and famously rejected a marriage proposal by John
Howard Payne by claiming that having been married to a genius she could only marry another
one.
During the last 20 years of her life, Mary Shelley was very busy editing and writing. She
published Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Lodore in 1835, and Falkner in 1837. She contributed
frequently to ladies' magazines and after her father's death she planned to write his memoirs but
ended up giving up on it. She also promoted Percy's poetry and was devoted to her son Percy
Florence. From 1939 Shelley's health started to decline, preventing her from work and she died
most likely of a brain tumor on the 1st of February 1851.
Mary Shelley's most famous novel, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, was
released anonymously when she was only 21 years old. Only from its second edition, five years
later, was her name to appear as the author. It was initially thought that the author was her

husband Percy, as the book was dedicated to William Godwin, his political hero. The work came
out of a competition proposed by Lord Byron in the summer of 1816 so as who could write the
best horror story. The central idea came to Shelly in a dream where she saw a student putting
together parts of a man's body and working through a big engine to animate it. She first wrote a
short story but Percy encouraged her to expand it into a novel. The novel had at the center of its
plot a failed attempt at artificial life, by the scientist Frankenstein, which produced a monster.
The work is considered to be a mixture of science fiction, gothic novel, and having elements
from the Romantic movement. It was partly inspired by the electrical experiments conducted on
dead and living animals by the italian physicist Giovanni Aldini. Frankenstein: or The Modern
Prometheus is also seen as a warning about the transformations of man under the Industrial
Revolution. In what is the chronological end of the novel's story, even if the scene belongs to the
beginning of the book, Frankenstein warns about the terrible effects of letting oneself be driven
by ambition and loosing control over its own possibilities.