Of Monsters and Miracles: Happy Birthday Mary Shelley

After Geneva, Percy and Mary moved to Italy where they celebrated the birth of a second daughter, Clara. Sadly, the Shelleys’ joy was short-lived, as Clara died in late 1818, and William died nine months later. Mary was devastated, writing, “The world will never be to me again as it was—there was a life & freshness in it that is lost to me….” 

Percy felt the gulf of grief that had grown between him and his wife, writing: “My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone, and left me in this dreary world alone?”

In 1819, Mary gave birth again to Percy Florence, the only child of the Shelleys to live to adulthood. However, her greatest tragedy was yet to come. Her husband was prone to dreams of grandeur, dreams that didn’t always hold up in the material world. In the 1820s he became obsessed with sailing, and in 1822, after going for a boat ride in his own poorly constructed vessel, drowned. 

Mary was understandably inconsolable. While hers and Percy’s relationship was complicated and often punctuated with long periods of silence, he was her partner, her creative counterpart, and the father to her only living child. In moments of strife, Percy had not spoken positively of Mary to his friends, and after his death, their social circle withdrew. Some of his friends even stole Percy’s actual heart once his body had washed ashore. Mary wanted to stay in Italy, but her father-in-law refused to support her unless she and young Percy came back to England. 

In the Introduction to Frankenstein’s third edition published in 1831, Mary writes: “[this book] was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.”

While calling Frankenstein “the offspring of happy days” is perhaps influenced by the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, we cannot blame Mary for thinking of it as a happier time and book than it was. As she became older her writing grew even darker and more pessimistic. Her 1826 novel, The Last Man, takes the essential message of Frankenstein: that isolation leads to danger and death, that survival and happiness can only be found in community, and applies it to a global scale through a pandemic that decimates the earth’s human population. In addition to her own writing, she was a careful and considerate steward of Percy’s writing. 

Mary passed away in 1851, with her son and daughter-in-law at her side. By 19th-century standards, she lived to the wizened old age of 53. 

Yet her seminal novel would go on to live a much longer life. Fascinatingly, in tracking attitudes toward Mary Shelley and Frankenstein we can track the progress of modern feminism and the rediscovery of the work of so many scribbling women. In the decades that followed Mary’s death, her work largely faded into obscurity. Percy was considered the real star of their marriage, and perhaps due to Mary’s advocating for his work, he became a critical member of the canon of Romantic writers. If people did talk about Mary and Frankenstein, they spoke solely of Percy’s influence.

This only began to change in the 1970s, when second-wave feminist scholars reanimated Mary Shelley’s novels and began considering them not as the dark daydreams of a poet’s wife, but for their own distinct perspective and message. 

During the past two years, I have read Frankenstein for the second, third, fourth, and even fifth time. It never ceases to amaze me, scare me, and inspire me. It is a novel that is both incredibly mature and indicative of the anxieties and fears of a very young girl. Moreso, as I have learned more about Mary’s life, I am consistently struck by her tenaciousness, her intelligence, and frankly, her weirdness. Not only was she a woman writer at a time when doing so practically unheard of, but she wrote about topics that disturbed, horrified, and taught us fundamental lessons about how we treat one another. She singlehandedly created the genre of science fiction, and dared to write dark and inventive stories far outside the safe topics of love and marriage. 

These days, Mary Shelley is all around us: from Margaret Atwood to Carmen Maria Machado, Poor Things to The Last of Us. She lives on our modern debates about technology, science, feminism, and environmentalism. She lives on in me, and all the many young women who scribble strange stories. 

Happy Birthday Mary. I loved you at 18 and I love you at 227. Thank you for all the nightmares. 

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