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| Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born Mary Godwin in London, England (1797). She is famous as the author of Frankenstein (1818), which is considered the first science fiction novel ever written. Her parents had only been married for five months when she was born. They were political radicals and didn't believe in the institution of marriage, but they wanted Mary to be legitimate. A few days after Mary was born, her mother, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died from complications with the pregnancy. Her father was devastated. Mary grew up thinking of herself as her mother's murderer, and she spent a lot of time at her mother's grave, trying to communicate with her spirit. Her father encouraged her to be an intellectual like her mother had been. He let her read anything she wanted from his library, and she often overheard the conversations he had with friends like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One night in 1806, she hid under the parlor sofa to hear Coleridge recite his famous poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Mary was about 15 years old when the poet Percy B. Shelley first visited her father. He was married at the time, but after dining at the house for several months, he and Mary fell in love. They went for walks every day and often stopped at her mother's grave. When her father found out about the relationship, he forbade Shelley to ever come to his house again. Percy Shelley attempted suicide, and when he recovered, Mary ran away with him to France. The Shelleys' first child was born prematurely and died. In the summer of 1816, she and her husband went to stay in a lakeside cottage in Switzerland with the poet Lord Byron. One rainy night, after reading a German book of ghost stories, Byron suggested that they all write their own horror stories. Everyone else wrote a story within the next day, but Mary took almost a week. Finally, she wrote an early version of a story about a scientist who brings a dead body to life. She turned the story into a novel, and Frankenstein was published in 1818. She was 21 years old. The rest of her life was filled with tragedy. Only one of her five children survived, and Percy Shelley was drowned in 1822. She spent the later part of her life editing her husband's papers, and struggling to support her son. ~Writer's Almanac |
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