Shelley, Mary

Tragedy, Depression, and Frankenstein

Shelley was educated at home and was then sent to school in Ramsgate. Her father remarried in 1801, but the relationship between Mary and her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont was never a happy one. Because of family tensions, Mary was sent to live in Dundee with friends in 1812. When she returned to England two years later, she fell in love with the Romantic poet Percy Shelley and the two eloped to France. After two years spent touring Europe, the couple married in London in 1816. Family tragedies, however, soon drew the Shelleys apart. In 1815, Mary had given birth to a daughter, Clara, who died only 12 days after birth.

William, the couple's son born in 1816, died three years later, and in 1822 Mary fell into a deep depression after miscarrying her third child. Alienated from his wife, Percy himself died drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia in a boating accident that same year. Mary spent her next 30 years working in England as a writer and living on the modest inheritance she received from Percy's estate. During these years, Shelley wrote several novels, including Valperga (1823); The Last Man (1826), a gloomy account of the destruction of humanity by a plague, often considered her best work; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830); Lodore (1835); and Falkner (1837). However, these are overshadowed in popularity by Frankenstein, written in her 20s. In the last part of her life, Shelley traveled extensively throughout Europe with her only surviving son. She died from a brain tumor in London on February 1, 1851.

Feminist readings of Shelley's novel Frankenstein in the 1970s made it an important text in the literary canon. The novel, where a monster is created by a male inventor, can be interpreted as a commentary on the nurturing role of women in society. Famously defined by the author as “my hideous progeny,” the book, some feminists readers interpret, spells out the warning that a science based on masculinist assumptions is dangerously marginalizing the role of women as educators. In addition, through such a tragic act of reproduction that excludes women, the novel indicts this exclusion and critiques theories of nonsexual reproduction that had been put forth by the science of the day. In her critique, it is the scientist Victor, the perpetrator of such motherless reproduction, who becomes the true monster of the story.

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