Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher and novelist. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died of sepsis ten days after giving birth to her. Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, their next-door neighbor, when Mary was four, and she was raised in an extended family that included a stepsister, Jane, and a half sister, Fanny Imlay. Largely self-educated--a source of some mortification to her--she was made aware from an early age that she was destined for, if not greatness, a respectable writing career. Her father founded a publishing company that he operated out of their house, and frequent visitors included Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet; the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in their living room very late one night. Mary and Jane, ignoring their curfew, hid behind the couch to listen.
She spent part of her early teens in the Scottish countryside with family friends. On one return from Scotland to London, in May 1814, three months before her seventeenth birthday, she fell in love with Shelley. They eloped to France, accompanied by Jane. Godwin, despite lifelong professions of his belief in free love, protested; on their first day abroad, in Calais, "a fat lady . . . arrived," Shelley wrote, in a diary he and Mary kept jointly, "who said that I had run away with her daughter." Mrs. Godwin could not persuade either girl to go back to London with her, and left alone after a night's argument. Mary, Shelley, and Jane (who now called herself "Claire") went to Paris and continued on to Switzerland by mule, returning in September to London, where they rented an apartment. Shelley continued intermittently to see Harriet, who was pregnant with their second child.
Shelley had to hide from bill collectors through the fall and winter, and apart from various clandestine assignations, Mary saw very little of him. Early in 1815 she began an affair with a lawyer, friend, and creditor, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley, who had become involved with Claire, approved of the liaison. On February 22, 1815, while Shelley was away, Mary give birth prematurely to her first child, a girl, who died twelve days later, shortly after Hogg had helped Mary and the infant move to a different apartment. Mary became pregnant again almost immediately by Shelley; her second child, William, was born on January 24, 1816.
In the spring of 1816 Mary, Shelley, William, and Claire set up house near Lake Geneva, below the Villa Diodati, which was occupied by the poet Lord Byron, with whom Claire had had a brief affair earlier in the year, and whose child she eventually bore. It was a rainy summer, and they spent long nights with Byron and Polidori, his doctor, talking about the supernatural and science, and challenging one another to write ghost stories. One such conversation in mid-June--mostly about galvanism being used to reanimate a corpse--stretched almost until dawn, and when Mary finally got to bed, she dreamed a student built a human being and--as she put it--woke him up with machinery. The dream inspired her first novel, Frankenstein. Its composition was interrupted by a move back to England, intermittent sickness from a third pregnancy, and the suicides of her half sister Fanny and of Harriet Shelley, in October and November, respectively. Harriet, also pregnant by Shelley, drowned herself in the Serpentine.
Mary married Shelley on December 30, 1816. Five months later she finished
>Frankenstein, and on September 2, 1817, she gave birth to her third child, Clara, and published Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour, a travel book. Frankenstein was published on January 1, 1818, and immediately became a bestseller, although she never made much money from it.
Several months later the Shelleys moved
