| Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley was born in August, 1797, the daughter of two notable English thinkers. Her father, William Godwin (1756-1836), was a well-known champion of the cause of the underprivileged. His most famous book, Political Justice (1793), is a criticism of existing society as well as an ethical treatise. His other famous book, Caleb Williams (1794), has as its theme the privilege of class and the irresponsibility of the aristocracy. It is to her father that Mary Shelley dedicated Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), was a well-known champion of the feminist cause, and her most famous work is A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin met in 1796 and were married in 1797, in part to protect the legal rights of a forthcoming child Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft died a few weeks after giving birth to her daughter. |
| The admiration of the famous nineteenth-century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley for Godwin's Political Justice caused him to seek out its author. As a result of their meeting, Godwin began depending heavily on the fortunes of his young poet friend. Although Shelley was already married, he and young Mary Godwin fell in love, despite the objections of Mary's parents (William Godwin had remarried in 1801) and the objections of Shelley's wife, Harriet. In June, 1814, at a time when Mary Godwin would not even have been seventeen, she and Shelley eloped, in company with Jane Clairmont (William Godwin's stepdaughter) on a journey to France and Switzerland. The three returned to England and found themselves mired in scandal; in addition, Shelley faced bleak financial days. The three passed the summer of 1816 in Switzerland, and it was during an evening that summer, while staying in Lord Byron's villa, that the story of Victor Frankenstein first occurred to Mary Shelley. She soon began writing her first work, later to be titled Frankenstein. |
| The return to London in September of 1816 ushered in a series of disasters in Mary's life. One of her half-sisters, Fanny Imlay, |
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