This content chronicles the tumultuous life of Mary Shelley, shaped by her radical intellectual parents, personal tragedies, and the bohemian literary circles of her time, ultimately leading to the creation of Frankenstein.
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For all the London intellectuals of that time, she was 'Godwin's daughter' and —
they also didn't forget to mention — 'Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter.' Both of her parents were great dissenters,
iconoclasts, and pioneers. Progressive thinkers of the age. They rejected dogma and tradition,
despised divine and human laws.
They believed that people should rely on reason and moral sense
in their lives, not religious dogma. They thought that the state, in any form, stifled individual
freedom. That religion existed to maintain an unjust social system.
They were married, but openly condemned marriage as legalized bondage for women.
Mary grew up alongside her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who
was born out of wedlock to her mother by another man, and Godwin never reproached her for it.
Mary introduced herself to everyone as 'Miss Wollstonecraft Godwin,' placing her mother’s surname before
her father's. Frankly, I initially wanted to make a video not about Mary Shelley, but about her mother,
but Halloween is approaching and it's time to talk about monsters and where they come from.
Mary Wollstonecraft died on the eleventh day after giving birth, leaving
her newborn daughter and three-year-old stepdaughter in the care of her husband. In sincere deep grief, Godwin spent the first
year of widowhood publishing a biography of his late wife. It was a pathologically frank book for its time
about the life of a woman who had constantly broken moral and social norms. It included everything:
extramarital affairs, ménages à trois, an illegitimate child, a suspiciously close friendship with women,
s_______e attempts — everything, right up to her agonizing death in childbirth fever.
The book caused a public scandal. The surname “Godwin” alone was now enough
to make respectable Britons cross themselves and call the police. And it must be said
that the profession of anarchist philosopher wasn’t lucrative even before this. Finding himself a widower with two young
girls and no stable income, Godwin was in a very difficult position,
and soon he remarried Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated and emancipated
woman. She presented herself as a widow, and she had two young children of her own — Charles and Claire —
but there is no evidence that she had ever actually been married before. Godwin was devoted to her,
and the marriage was successful, but little Mary Godwin, on the contrary, came to hate her stepmother.
The Godwins founded a publishing firm that mainly sold children's books.
However, the business didn’t bring in any profit, and Godwin had to borrow
large sums of money and pay off some debts with others. His friends and admirers — fortunately,
he had true fans — periodically had to rescue the philosopher from the debtors' prison.
Mary Godwin's education was strange:
sporadic yet brilliant. Most of her knowledge came from her father’s books,
which she could read even in manuscript form. Godwin often took the children on educational excursions
and introduced them to his many intellectual friends.
Mary read a lot and listened a lot. Godwin himself described his fifteen-year-old daughter as 'extraordinarily bold,
somewhat authoritative, and with an active mind. Her thirst for knowledge is great,
and her persistence in everything she undertakes is almost unconquerable.' He had every reason to be proud of her,
but then a wrench was thrown into the works. This wrench was the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
They met in 1814, when she was 17 and he was 22.
He had just published his first poem, 'Queen Mab,' which most people didn’t understand,
and those who did were shocked. I belong to those who didn’t understand it, but according to Wikipedia, this poem
contains a terrifying critique of religion, monarchy, and contemporary marriage. That is, the young rebellious
poet-philosopher considered Godwin and his late wife practically gods and even wanted to save Godwin
from his endless debts, but his own financial situation was no better.
He came from a respectable, wealthy aristocratic family that wasn’t thrilled
that their heir had become enamored with radical political ideas and constantly trumpeted them in writing.
By the way, for written propaganda of atheism at that time,
you could go to jail — there was a law against blasphemy for that. For atheism, he was expelled from Oxford,
and his father disowned him. After that, Shelley convinced
an enthusiastic 16-year-old high school girl named Harriet Westbrook that her father and school were oppressing her,
secretly took her away, they got married and both families stopped giving them money.
By the time Shelley met Mary, he already had a daughter and several female 'kindred spirits,'
not a penny to his name, and a disappointed wife utterly exhausted by their constant poverty. So, Shelley couldn’t help Godwin
financially, so instead he did the next best thing: he seduced his daughter.
Mary and Percy began secretly meeting at her mother’s grave. They immediately realized they had found each other:
none of his previous enthusiastic admirers had such firm convictions that
marriage was an anachronism and that love granted rights that disappointment took away.
To Mary’s surprise and indignation, her father did not approve of his daughter’s affair with a married man.
It turned out that marriage was a dead concept only until it involved the reputation
of his own daughter. Godwin quickly backtracked, renounced his progressive ideas,
and demanded that the relationship end. Of course, Mary didn’t think of obeying, and on July 28, 1814,
the couple secretly ran to France, taking Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont with them,
who also couldn’t sit still at home and longed for freedom and romance.
The trio set off southward, putting into practice the principles of free love and creativity.
'It felt like we were living in a novel,' Mary Shelley later recalled.
She and Percy would later publish a book about this journey,
The History of a Six Weeks' Tour, because that’s exactly how long their freedom lasted.
The group reached Switzerland, where a lack of money forced them
to turn back. In September, they returned to England. To Mary’s genuine surprise, her father
slammed the door in her face. Thus began a decidedly unglamorous period of their lives.
The trio moved into a cheap apartment, where they continued reading, writing poetry,
and running from creditors. Mary was pregnant, feeling unwell, and unable to join in the revelry.
Almost certainly, a non-platonic relationship had begun between Shelley and Claire Clairmont,
something Mary had to tolerate in the name of free love. Her mood didn’t improve
when she learned that Shelley’s wife Harriet had given birth to a son, heir to Shelley’s estate and baronetcy.
However, at that moment, even Harriet was barely making ends meet.
Their luck turned when, in early January 1815, Shelley’s grandfather passed away, and the poet and his women had hopes
of not starving. But the settlement of financial matters between Shelley and his father dragged on until April
of the following year. In February, Mary prematurely gave birth to a daughter who died ten days later,
largely due to hardships. The death of the child had a devastating effect on Mary. She was haunted by nightmares
and dreamt that the child wasn’t dead, that she had managed to warm her by the fire.
Meanwhile, Shelley’s fame as a poet was growing, and Claire Clairmont, too, wanted
a famous poet for herself. Naturally, her attention turned to Byron, who at that time
had just reached the pinnacle of success. Handsome, egoistic individualist, undeniable genius,
and marketing wizard, Byron turned his entire life into a romantic performance. I don’t mean to say
he was a hypocrite; rather, he made his poetry an autobiographical novel, a blog in verse.
Many enthusiastic women would have loved to appear in this novel, and Claire Clairmont
somehow managed to do so. Byron was never in love with her for a moment, but at the time, he didn’t refuse any woman.
Of all his admirers, Claire stood out only because she introduced Byron to Shelley.
Both poets admired each other from afar and were glad to become closer. On one hand, they were
very different people, but on the other, they had many shared beliefs. They were like Eugene Onegin and Lensky:
water and flame, elements and prose, ice and stone. Through Claire, Byron invited Percy and Mary to spend
the summer with him in Geneva. Claire, by that time pregnant with the lord’s child, tagged along,
hoping to secure some guarantees from Byron about her and their future child.
In May 1816, the trio set off for the continent again. Byron had effectively fled England, where the scandal
surrounding his divorce, rumors of his affair with his half-sister Augusta, and his ever-growing debt
had made his life unbearable. For more details, please see the story about his daughter Ada.
He left in April 1816 and never returned to his homeland.
In July, Byron rented Villa Diodati, 4 km from Geneva, on the shore of the lake of the same name. Percy Bysshe,
Mary, their young son and Claire settled into a much more modest house nearby.
Very quickly, Byron and Shelley became almost inseparable. Villa Diodati stood right
on the lakeshore, and it was said that a hotel on the opposite shore offered paid balcony seats
where guests could watch the scandalously famous poets and their no less scandalously famous companions
through a small telescope. All the ladies openly condemned and pitied these women,
but many secretly envied them. The poets — the eldest of whom,
Byron, was only 28, and the women were just 18 — spent their time composing,
reading each other their new poems, and rowing on the lake until late at night,
when the weather allowed, of course. It was the infamous 'year without a summer.' A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia
had filled the skies over half the globe with volcanic ash. Maybe the causes were different,
but the fact remains: the summer of 1816 in Switzerland was exceptionally miserable.
It was cold, and it rained almost nonstop. Our group, trapped within four walls
without the possibility of walks or romantic boat rides, was going mad with boredom.
Sitting by the fireplace, they entertained themselves with German ghost stories.
Fantasmagoriana — a French book of translated German horror tales —
fascinated our romantics, who were influenced by the gloomy weather,
life problems, wine and lau***um. 'There was The Tale of the Faithless Lover,'
Mary later recalled, 'where the hero, thinking he was embracing the fiancée to whom he had just become engaged,
found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of the woman he once abandoned. There was also the story of
the sinful progenitor of a family, who was condemned to sentence to death
every younger son of his unfortunate line with a kiss, as soon as they reached adulthood.
At midnight, by the faint light of the moon, a giant ghostly figure, clad in armor,
would slowly walk through the gloomy park alley…' Byron proposed a competition to the entire group —
Percy, Mary, his 20-year-old doctor Polidori, and Claire — to see who could write the scariest ghost story.
Byron started a vampire tale, inspired by what he’d heard during his travels through the Balkans,
while Shelley, who was only adept at writing political pamphlets in prose, quickly abandoned the attempt.
Polidori 'came up with a terrifying lady whose head was a skull — a punishment for
peeping through a keyhole,' and Mary decided to write a serious story —
'A tale that would speak to our hidden fears and send a nervous chill through our veins;
a story that would make readers afraid to look back, with blood freezing in their veins and their hearts pounding loudly.'
It was at Villa Diodati that Mary Godwin began drafting the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster.
At that time, electricity and its natural properties were of enormous interest to both scientists
and the general public. People knew very little about electricity back then, but they hoped
that if humanity could tame this terrifying force of nature, which manifested in deadly lightning,
it would reach such heights and power that it was breathtaking. On the other hand,
many were worried that if man, like Prometheus, stole the celestial fire, it wouldn’t lead to anything good.
In other words, the interest in electricity at that time can be compared to today’s interest
in artificial intelligence. Similarly, the topic stirred heated debates among people
who were far from being experts but were greatly concerned about how far
technology could go and what frightening and dangerous consequences it could have for humanity.
The most frightening experiments at that time, of course, were those of Luigi Galvani,
who applied electrodes to the severed legs of a frog, causing them to twitch as if alive.
This phenomenon was named galvanism in his honor. Galvani proposed the theory that electricity
was somehow connected to movement and life itself, and that perhaps
all living creatures were animated by some sort of electricity coursing through their bodies.
His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, conducted public demonstrations of the effect of galvanism,
where, in front of a terrified audience, he made not only dead
frogs but also the body of an executed criminal
convulse under the influence of electricity. Dynamo machines existed even back then.
Both Byron and Shelley enthusiastically discussed these experiments that summer.
'Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated; the phenomenon of galvanism seemed to offer hope for this;
perhaps scientists would learn to create individual organs, connect them,
and breathe life into them,' Mary later wrote. She said little but listened attentively.
Every morning they asked her,
'So, have you come up with a ghost story yet?' and every morning she replied, embarrassed,
that she had not. But her mind was working with terrifying intensity. Then came the night when all
those discussions about the mysteries of life and death, the ghost stories, and her own imagination bore fruit.
'It was after midnight when we went to bed. Laying my head on the pillow, I didn’t sleep,
nor was I merely thinking. My imagination seized me with such vividness
as ordinary dreams don’t possess. My eyes were closed, but with an inner vision,
I saw with extraordinary clarity a pale student of forbidden sciences bending over the creature he had created.
I saw the hideous thing lying motionless at first, then, under the influence of some powerful force,
it showed signs of life and began to move awkwardly… The master is horrified by his success
and flees in fear from his creation. He hopes the weak spark of life he has ignited will fade,
that the creature, animated only halfway, will become dead matter once again; he falls asleep,
hoping the grave will forever reclaim the fleetingly revived wretched corpse… He sleeps,
but something wakes him; he opens his eyes and sees the monster pulling back the bed curtains
at his bedside, gazing at him with yellow, watery, yet lucid eyes.'
Half scared to death herself, Mary began writing down what
she initially thought would be a short story the next morning. 'It was a dreary night of November,'
she began, recording her dream. She later described that summer
in Switzerland as the moment “when I first emerged from childhood into life.”
But Frankenstein wasn't finished that summer. Percy, who always encouraged his wife’s literary interests,
insisted she take her time and expand the idea into a full novel.
When summer ended, they returned to England and settled in Bath. Claire was still with them,
as Byron had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her,
though he promised to take care of the future child. The trio was still estranged from their families,
but Mary maintained correspondence with her other half-sister, Fanny Imlay,
the illegitimate daughter of their brilliant mother, who still lived with her stepfather and his second wife.
Fanny’s situation was unenviable. Being an unmarried young woman in England at that time meant being
a financial burden on the family. Fanny, a sensitive and vulnerable girl, constantly felt
she was a burden. Her letters to Mary grew increasingly desperate, and finally,
on October 9, Fanny wrote such a distressing letter that it sent Percy Shelley racing to find her,
but it was too late. On the morning of October 10, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a hotel in Bristol
with a note and an empty bottle of lau***um.
Both Mary and Shelley, who was also fond of Fanny and vaguely suspected she had been
in love with him unrequitedly, were deeply affected by her death. Before they could fully recover,
on December 10, Percy’s wife, Harriet, was found drowned in a lake. Her relationship
had deteriorated into open hostility, and Harriet had tried to blackmail him into returning
and caring for their children, which only pushed Shelley further away from her. Abandoned by her husband and family, unable
to care for her children, rumors swirled that Harriet had fallen so far that she had turned to prostitution.
Few doubted that her death was no accident.
Although Harriet’s death allowed Mary and Percy to legitimize their relationship,
it did nothing to improve her mental state.
The dead were beginning to pile up around her. Still grieving her daughter’s death, mourning Fanny,
and horrified by Harriet’s tragic end, Mary began writing the first chapters of her novel.
Captain Robert Walton sets off from Arkhangelsk to search for the North Pole and becomes trapped in the ice.
A dog sled driven by a giant figure races past them in the polar night…
That fall, Percy Shelley often lived away from home to avoid creditors
knocking at the door and threatening to throw him into debtors' prison. Allegra Byron, the child
whose birth inconvenienced everyone, was passed from hand to hand and eventually
died in a boarding school. From the beautiful story of free love, only fragments remained. The grotesque
horror tale of the monster was turning into a tragic novel about a miserable creature abandoned
by its creator. The monster wasn’t monstrous at birth. It was the fact that its father rejected it,
left it to die, that turned it into a monster. Conceived as a superhuman,
beautiful and powerful, it wandered the world, trying to grasp a bit of love and warmth,
but everyone turned away from it and drove it away — until it began killing in desperation.
The threat of prison, poor health, and the fear of losing custody of their children drove Percy and Mary Shelley
to flee to Italy. They left on March 12, 1818 - they had no intention of returning.
But on January 1, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published.
The novel was published anonymously, with a preface written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and dedicated
to William Godwin. It seems that critics who didn’t realize
who the author was approached the book with greater understanding and interest
than those who suspected the author was a young woman. Walter Scott
praised the novel as 'an extraordinary story, in which the author, as it seems to us, reveals
extraordinary powers of poetic imagination.' In two other reviews where the author was identified as
'the daughter of William Godwin,' critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the fact that it was written by a woman.
Despite the criticism, Frankenstein achieved almost immediate success with the public. It was even adapted
for the stage before being adapted for film more than 50 times. Despite this,
Mary and her family continued to live in poverty. Mary sold the rights to the publisher for 30 pounds — that was
all she earned, as authors didn’t receive royalties at that time. In Italy, they began a wandering life,
never staying long in one place. Mary was often ill, and Percy had
numerous love affairs. In September 1818, their one-year-old daughter
Clara died of dysentery in Venice. In June 1819, their son William died of malaria in Rome. Mary was once again childless
and alone, plunging into a deep depression, which further distanced her from her husband.
For a time, Mary found solace only in her writing. People often forget
that Mary Shelley wasn’t the author of just one book; she was an accomplished writer with seven
published novels. Her third novel, The Last Man, published in 1826, was one of the first
apocalyptic novels, describing the end of humanity due to an unknown plague,
a precursor to many of today’s films. She struggled to earn a living from her writing,
but her fees were modest.
In the summer of 1822, Mary, Percy, Claire, and their friends Edward and Jane Williams moved to an isolated
villa in Magni, on the seashore near the village of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici. To Mary, this cramped house
seemed like a dungeon. felt like a prison. That summer, Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his wife.
Most of the poems Shelley wrote in San Terenzo were dedicated to Jane, not Mary.
Together with Edward Williams, Shelley bought a new two-masted schooner, which he named Don Juan
in honor of Byron’s poem. Shelley was a decent sailor and thoroughly enjoyed his new toy. On July 1, 1822,
Shelley and Williams set sail for Livorno, where Shelley planned to meet with Byron
to discuss a new journal project, The Liberal. After the meeting, on July 8, in a violent storm, Shelley,
Williams, and their cabin boy set sail from Livorno to Lerici. They never returned.
Mary learned of the disaster through a letter addressed to Percy:
'Please, write to us and tell us how you got home,' wrote friends from Livorno,
'because it’s said you had bad weather after setting sail on Monday,
and we are worried.' 'The letter fell from my hands,' Mary later recalled. 'I began to tremble.'
She and Jane Williams rushed to Livorno and then to Pisa in the faint hope that their husbands were still alive.
Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed ashore about
halfway between Livorno and Lerici. Friends cremated Percy Shelley’s body right there
on the beach, in accordance with Italian laws of the time, which were meant to prevent the spread of disease.
During the cremation, an unusual phenomenon occurred: Shelley’s heart didn’t burn completely. It is said
this happened due to calcification caused by developing tuberculosis, which
had literally turned the poet’s heart to stone. The heart was removed from the funeral pyre and given to Mary.
At 24, she became a widow and never remarried, though she received many proposals.
She responded to her suitors that she had been married to a genius and could only marry
another one. Of her four children, only one survived, and he eventually became the heir to Shelley’s estate.
For much of her life, she continued to struggle with poverty. She worked on her novels and
edited her late husband’s poems. By the 1830s, Shelley had become a celebrated poet,
and publishers constantly approached Mary about reissuing his works.
They wanted to tone down their radical spirit, but Mary refused. The poet’s relatives insisted
that Shelley’s scandalous biography not become public, and Mary succeeded
in telling her husband’s story by including extensive biographical notes in editions of his poems.
Mary suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis,
which sometimes made it difficult for her to read or write. On February 1, 1851, she died at the age of
fifty-three, likely from a brain tumor. On the first anniversary of her death, her heirs
opened her writing desk. Inside, they found locks of her dead children’s hair,
her shared journal with Percy, and a copy of his poem Adonais, in which one page was wrapped around his heart.
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