Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born to two incredibly progressive intellectuals: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin was an author and radical philosopher, and Wollstonecraft was also a writer, as well as being a fierce women’s rights activist. That Wollstonecraft died days after Mary Shelley was born meant that her father was responsible for her upbringing as an intellectual and a writer too. At the age of seventeen, Mary met and fell in love with a prominent poet of the Romantic movement, Percy Bysshe Shelley. At the age of 19, whilst holidaying in Lake Geneva with Percy and another prominent poet, Lord Byron, a competition was created to see who could come up with the best ghost story. It was this competition that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. By this time, Shelley had already experienced the death of her mother, sister, and two children, so knew a lot about loss. It’s important to consider how much of an influence these deaths would have had on the writing of Frankenstein. We can even consider the extent to which Mary Shelley relates to the characters in her own text, namely the Creature, who desires companionship but experiences great suffering, and Victor, who loses everyone around him and feels immense guilt for still being alive himself.