Who was Mary Shelley and why does Frankenstein still matter?

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 in London, the daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the late 18th century: the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after her daughter's birth from complications of childbirth. Shelley never knew her mother, but she grew up in a household full of her mother's books, her mother's reputation, and the weight of having killed her simply by being born.

She wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus when she was eighteen years old. It was published when she was twenty. By the standards of any era, this is extraordinary.

How did Frankenstein get written?#

The story of the novel's origin is almost as famous as the novel itself. In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin (not yet Shelley -- she and Percy Shelley were not married until December of that year) was travelling in Switzerland with Percy, their friend Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori. The summer was abnormally cold -- 1816 is known in meteorological history as "the year without a summer," caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which threw ash into the upper atmosphere and disrupted weather patterns globally.

Trapped indoors at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, the group read German ghost stories and Byron proposed a competition: each would write a ghost story. Mary struggled initially. Then, as she described in her 1831 preface to the revised edition, she had a waking dream. She saw a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside a thing he had assembled. She saw it stir. She saw him flee in horror from what he had made.

She began writing the next morning. What had started as a short story became a novel.

What was her life like when she wrote it?#

By the summer of 1816, Mary had already lived through more loss than most people experience in a lifetime. Her mother died eleven days after her birth. Her half-sister Fanny Imlay committed suicide in October 1816 -- while Mary was writing Frankenstein. Percy's wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in December 1816, which enabled Percy and Mary to marry legally but at the cost of a woman's life.

Her first child, a daughter, was born prematurely in February 1815 and died twelve days later. In the spring of 1815 she recorded a dream in her journal: "Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived."

The creature that Victor Frankenstein abandons the moment it opens its eyes was written by a woman who had just lost a child and whose own mother had died giving birth to her. The question the creature asks -- why was I brought into existence if you were not prepared to love me? -- was not purely philosophical.

What happened after Frankenstein?#

Shelley went on to write several more novels, none of which achieved the cultural reach of Frankenstein. The Last Man (1826) is a post-apocalyptic novel -- she invented the form -- in which plague destroys humanity, leaving a single survivor. It is arguably her second-best work and was dismissed by contemporary reviewers as unpleasant.

Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in July 1822, just before his thirtieth birthday. Mary was twenty-four. She spent the rest of her life editing his work, raising their surviving son Percy Florence, and writing.

She died on 1 February 1851 of a suspected brain tumour, at the age of fifty-three. She was buried in St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, beside her mother and father, having outlived her husband and three of their four children.

Why does Frankenstein still matter?#

Frankenstein still matters because its central question -- what responsibility does a creator bear toward what it has created? -- has not become less urgent. If anything, it has become more urgent. Every significant technological debate of the past thirty years has circled the same question Shelley asked at eighteen: what happens when we build something that can suffer, and then abandon it?

The fact that the novel was written by a teenage girl who had lost her mother, her child, and her half-sister while writing it -- and who embedded all of that grief and all of those questions in a story about a creature made of dead bodies and abandoned in the snow -- makes it one of the most remarkable documents in literary history.

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Further reading#

For the creature's specific symbolic significance, what the monster in Frankenstein represents covers the critical landscape.

For the question of who the real monster actually is, Victor or the creature is the companion piece.

For what to read after Frankenstein, the full list of recommendations covers every direction the novel can point you.

Frankenstein is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley, Grove Press, 2000
• Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Routledge, 1988
• Mary Shelley, "Author's Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition," Frankenstein, 1831