Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born into an argument about what a human being could become. Her father, William Godwin, was the most radical political philosopher in England — a man who believed that reason, properly applied, could transform society. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman before it was possible to write such a thing and survive professionally. The house on Somers Town where Mary grew up was a gathering point for the intellectual left of London: scientists, poets, dissenters, people who thought the old order was not merely wrong but morally indefensible. Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after her daughter was born. The child was raised in the shadow of a woman she would spend her life trying to understand — and trying to become. She educated herself in her father’s library, read Latin and Greek, studied the scientific debates of the day. By the time she was sixteen, she had read more widely than most men twice her age would ever manage.

In the summer of 1816, Mary — eighteen years old, traveling with Percy Bysshe Shelley and their infant son — arrived at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. It was the Year Without a Summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora had thrown enough ash into the atmosphere to darken the sky across Europe. The nights were cold and strange, and the house kept its guests inside. Lord Byron proposed a contest: everyone would write a ghost story. Byron produced nothing finished. Percy produced nothing finished. Mary Shelley produced Frankenstein. She had been struggling to find a story when the idea arrived fully formed in a waking dream — a philosopher kneeling beside his created thing, horrified at what he had made. She was eighteen when she began writing it. The novel was published anonymously in 1818, when she was twenty. Most readers assumed the author was Percy Shelley. The 1823 second edition named her. The argument at the center of Frankenstein has not been resolved in the two centuries since: creation carries obligation. To make something alive is to take on a moral debt that cannot be discharged by walking away. Science without conscience is not science. It is just power.

The novel made her famous and left her largely alone. Percy Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia in July 1822, leaving Mary a widow at twenty-four with a young son to support. She returned to England and spent the next three decades writing — Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), a speculative novel set in a plague-ravaged future that reads as extended grief, Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837) — while also editing Percy’s unpublished manuscripts and working to secure his literary reputation. She was methodical about it. She wrote reviews, travel writing, biographical sketches for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. The work kept coming. What is easy to miss, reading the novels after Frankenstein, is that she was twenty years old when she published the first one. Everything that followed was written by someone who had already done the hardest thing, and knew it, and kept going anyway.