Born in London in 1797, Mary Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollestonecraft, both of them writers and revolutionaries famous for their radical ideas. Godwin was primarily a political philosopher, and Wollstonecraft was an early feminist who died 11 days after Mary Shelley’s birth (see A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Raised by Godwin and his new wife, Mary grew up in an intellectual, open environment, where ideas and the arts flourished and idealistic admirers crowded around the family table. One of her father’s admirers, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, fell in love with the beautiful young intellectual, and the two eloped in 1814, when Mary was 16, despite the fact that Shelley was already married. The next decade of Mary’s life was marked by tragedy: her first child was born in 1815 and died shortly after; Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Percy’s wife, Harriet, both committed suicide the following year; Mary and Percy’s second child, William, died as a young boy. Mary lost her third child as well, and, after giving birth to the one child who would survive, Percy Florence, went on to suffer a dangerous miscarriage.
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