Mary Shelley (1797-1851) |
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born August 30, 1797,
in Somers Town, London, England.
in Somers Town, London, England.
Her mother died soon after Mary's birth, so her father William Godwin was left to take care of Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay.
William later married a woman who brought two children into the family. They then had a son together. Although Mary didn't have a formal education, she liked to read books from her father's library. Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave. She also liked to daydream, to escape from her home life into her imagination.
In 1814, Mary met poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who was her father's student. Percy was already married but they fell in love and ran away together.
In the following years, Mary had several miscarriages. During that time, she wrote her most famous piece, Frankenstein, after experiencing a bad dream. Quotes from Mary Shelley"My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free." "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos." |
Together, Percy and Mary struggled through multiple deaths of close relatives, two of which were suicides. One of the suicides was caused by Percy's wife, who was tired of waiting for her husband to return to her. After the wife's death, Mary and Percy got married. In 1819, they had their fourth child, Percy Florence, who lived until adulthood. Three years later, in 1822, Mary's husband drowned while sailing with his friend in the Gulf of Spezia. Works by Mary Shelley |
Mary had become a widow at the age of 24, but she continued to work hard to take care of her only son.
Over the next 30 years, she focused on writing novels, as well as preserving her husband's place in literary history.
On February 1, 1851, she died of brain cancer. She was buried St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth, next to her parents and her husband's cremated heart.
Facts about Mary ShelleyShelley kept her deceased husband's heart wrapped in silk, in her desk.
She published her first poem, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, at age ten. Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is considered to be the first feminist. |