There is some warrant for seeing Mary Shelley as a reflection of her parents, for both mother and father were extraordinary. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, published the classic manifesto of sexual equality, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her father, William Godwin, established his preeminence in radical British political thought with his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and won a permanent place in literary history with his novel Caleb Williams (1794), often considered the first English detective novel. The toast of radical social circles, the two were bound to meet. When they did, in the summer of 1796, an immediate mutual attraction began, and they were married on 29 March 1797. On 30 August of that year Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born. Complications from her birth resulted in her mother's death 10 September.
In 1801, when little Mary was four, Godwin remarried. The only memories of her stepmother that Mary recorded are bad ones. Godwin's second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought her own children, Charles and Jane, into the family, and young Mary felt displaced. A son, William, born in 1803, furthered the girl's sense of alienation, and she felt driven to compete, not only with the other children but also with the second Mrs.
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