Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797 - 1851

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797 – 1851

(née Godwin)

Writer.

30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851

Miniature portrait of Mary Shelley 1857; Reginald Easton (1807–1893), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – A Tribute by Bethany Brigham

It is fitting that a blue plaque should commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s residence at what is now 87 Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury (the site was 26 Marchmont Street until 1878). Shelley’s time in Bloomsbury in the period 1815-1816 may have been only intermittent as the financial precariousness of the author and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) following their elopement in July 1814 meant that they were frequently on the move. However, as an area of London associated with the arts, education, and medicine, Bloomsbury represents much of what preoccupied Shelley throughout her life and literary career.

It was through these subjects that Shelley expanded on, and engaged with, the works of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and William Godwin (1756-1836). As Angela Wright explains, Wollstonecraft became ‘globally famous’ as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which argued for the importance of extending women’s education beyond ‘the frivolities of needlework and the pianoforte’, while Godwin too ‘cast reverberations across the world’ with his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (p.6). As the daughter of two notorious radical writers and philosophers, it was expected that Shelley should attain literary greatness; such an expectation could only have been heightened by the death of Wollstonecraft, who succumbed to puerperal fever (a postpartum infection) shortly after Shelley’s birth.

With claims to such a considerable literary heritage, Shelley often faced public scrutiny and critical reviews continuously discussed her work in relation to the author’s personal life and family circle. Even though her most famous novel, Frankenstein (1818), was first published anonymously, reviewers associated the text with materialism, immorality and ‘dark and gloomy views of nature and of man, bordering too closely on impiety’ because of initial suggestions that the novel was the work of Godwin or Percy Bysshe (Edinburgh Magazine, p.249). Furthermore, both contemporary and modern critics have suggested that the Shelley’s literary prowess diminished following the successive deaths of her children, Percy Bysshe in 1822, and her friend Lord Byron in 1824, which as Julie Carlson has noted, established the traditional construction of the author as the ‘perpetual mourner’ (pp.170-171). Indeed, her later novel, The Last Man (1826), which has largely been interpreted as a biographical recount, was dismissed as an overwrought expression of Shelley’s grief, while later novels like Lodore (1835)and Falkner (1837) are typically oversimplified or overlooked as commercial domestic romances.

While it is tempting to remember Mary Shelley predominantly as the author of Frankenstein, particularly as the novel’s subsequent editions of 1823 and 1831 and endless adaptations have allowed the story to attain mythological status and an unwavering popular currency, Shelley in fact authored a wealth of novels, short stories, essays, biographies, and reviews. As Wright points out, an overwhelming proportion of this material was composed in the years following the death of her husband, when her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, refused to offer financial aid and the writer was compelled to provide not only for herself, but also her surviving son, Percy Florence (p.2). As the work of Anna Mercer further aptly demonstrates, Shelley contributed to Percy Bysshe’s work throughout his lifetime and as an editor of the posthumous editions of his works. Shelley’s literary life beyond Frankenstein is therefore significant, not only because her own body of work is substantial, but also because she acted as adviser, editor, and transcriber for those around her, including Godwin and Byron.

Shelley’s greatest legacy, however, is undoubtedly her capacity to write enduringly relevant novels that engage with issues recognisable to modern readers. Frankenstein of course revolves around Victor Frankenstein, who as an unregulated and isolated figure, dangerously dabbles in medical science, creating a new being that he subsequently abandons. As Anne Mellor argues, Frankenstein has maintained its cultural relevance as an ethical text that highlights the need to impose informed guidelines and limits on the medico-scientific community (p.827). Such an ethical engagement is most readily demonstrable in Frankenstein when Victor, having pushed the boundaries of scientific research and experimentation, shares his experiences with the ambitious scientific explorer, Robert Walton:

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind (p.37).

Victor uses storytelling as a means of warning that no pursuit is worth interfering with one’s ‘domestic affections’, raising the tension between Victor’s ambition and both his personal relationships and his connection with humanity (p.37). Shelley’s Frankenstein offered a narrative framework through which to highlight ‘unlawful’ medico-scientific practices as a matter not only of legality, but also of morality. Through Frankenstein then, Shelley posits literature as a means through which to explore the relationship between practitioner and patient or research subject, and the novel continues to play a role in debates around the potential inequalities that underline scientific research and healthcare, particularly in relation to women, the poor and lower classes, the vulnerable and marginal groups.

As the work of Sharon Ruston has most recently outlined, Shelley’s familiarity with leading scientists and medical practitioners of the day, who sought the unlock the secrets of life and death, meant that Shelley was well-equipped to engage with the ethical concerns of the nineteenth century. But Shelley’s Frankenstein also addresses concerns that remain familiar in a modern context where popular distrust of medical science frequently resurfaces in response to debates around topics such as vaccination, genetic modification and genetically modified crops. However, Shelley’snovel offers more than a straightforward critique of medical science. For example, Hannah Davies suggests that by offering a reasonably balanced view of medical science, that accounts for its potential to improve the human condition and the reasons Victor’s experimentation went awry, Shelley rather demonstrates that ‘society and science must work together’ (pp.34-35). Equally recognisable in its modernity is Shelley’s The Last Man, which set at the end of the twenty-first century, envisions a world beset by the Plague. The protagonist of the 1826 novel, Lionel Verney, describes the catastrophic environmental and societal conditions that attend the Plague as political systems and medical institutions begin to fail.

While The Last Man, much like Frankenstein, is often regarded as a novel that simply conveys medico-scientific horror, Brittany Pladek suggests that Shelley again highlights literature’s ‘therapeutic potential’ (p.130). Indeed, Shelley’s novels offer the prospect of renewal, rebirth, and above all, hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances. As Verney truly becomes the last of the human race, he leaves behind an instructive monument for a foregone race, a written narrative that, as noted by Eileen Botting, demonstrates that ‘Shelley’s apocalypses are never final’ (p.16). Shelley’s preface to The Last Man in factframes the novel with a fictional 1818 account of the discovery of Verney’s fragmented tale during a visit to the cave of the Cumaean Sybil, which as a distinctive symbol of feminine creative agency, offers a warning from the future, the prospect of a new beginning, or perhaps the chance for a different ending.

A similar sense of agency is to be found in Shelley’s final novels where the author highlights the regenerative power of women and the roles that they can play in remediatingindividual and societal wounds. Lisa Vargo notes that in Lodore, Shelley introduces a number of mothers and daughters in the novel whose lives represent the problems with women’s education that Wollstonecraft contemplated in works such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) (p.181). Through the portrayals of two daughters, Ethel and Fanny, Vargo suggests that Shelley ‘converses with her mother’s words to regenerate revolutionary principles in the 1830s’ and, most importantly, imagines a woman’s life ‘as the model for social transformation’ (pp.181&186).

The central female character of Falkner, Elizabeth, is an example as one such model, as she helps Falkner, a figure plagued by the sins of his past, to find redemption through community and familial reconciliation. Melissa Sites suggests that in Falkner then is a story about masculine heroes who are purged of their selfish belief systems in favour of gentler alternatives associated with women and social reform (p.172). Betty Bennett further notes that Shelley reversions the concerns of Frankenstein in her final novel by putting forward an accessible formula for interrogating and restructuring those values that lead to the destruction of the individual and society (p.16). Shelley then reflects the cornerstones of Bloomsbury’s cultural heritage. From her literary legacy, we can learn about the curative capacity of literature, the importance of education and medical ethics, and ultimately, the healing power of women.

Bethany Brigham recently completed her PhD at Northumbria University. Her thesis focused on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century gothic fiction and the history of medical science with an especial focus on the symbiotic relationship between medical and literary discourses surrounding the development of anatomical study. Her research interests include women’s writing and working-class narratives, popular literature and culture, public health and medical reform, bioethics, medical professionalisation and practice, death and the body.

Sources Cited:

Bennett, Betty T., ‘“Not this time, Victor!”: Mary Shelley’s Reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner’, Mary Shelley in Her Times, eds Betty T. Bennett & Stuart Curran (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1-17.

Davies, H., ‘Can Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein be read as an early research ethics text?’, Medical Humanities, 30 (2004), 32-35.

Hunt Botting, Eileen, Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Mellor, Anne K., ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly: Frankenstein and Its Environments Then and Now, 83 (2020), 823-827.

Mercer, Anna, The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary

Wollstonecraft Shelley (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Pladek, Brittany, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).

‘Review — Frankenstein’, The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 2 (March 1818), 249-253.

Ruston, Sharon, The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2021).

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Sites, Melissa, ‘Utopian Domesticity as Social Reform in Mary Shelley’s Falkner, Keats-Shelley Journal, 54 (2005), 148-172.

Vargo, Lisa, ‘Further Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: Lodore as an Imagined Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft’, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, Helen M. Buss, D.L. Macdonald, & Anne McWhir (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 177-187.

Wright, Angela, Mary Shelley (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018).

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Education

Attended a dame-school (a private school for young children ran by a dame).

1811 Attended Miss Caroline Petman’s school for the daughters of dissenters at Ramsgate for seven months.

Tutored by her father subjects including French, Latin, history, literature and Bible studies. Later acquired Italian, Greek and Spanish.

Some Key Achievements and Interests

A ghost story contest inspired the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

1818 Frankenstein published becoming very popular across different social spheres and being adapted for the stage, translated and widely discussed.

Matilda written but not publishedWilliam Godwin fearing a consequent scandal. The novel describes a father’s incestuous love for this daughter. It was finally published in 1959.

Worked on editing and publishing P B Shelley’s works.

1824 Published P B Shelley’s Posthumous Poems.

Wrote prolifically: reviews, short-stories, poems and novels.

1826 The Last Man published. Set in the 21^st century, it was not well received at the time.

Turned her attention to historical fiction before setting her work in more contemporary settings.

Continued to find ways to reprint her P B’s work.

1844 Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 published.

Issues

Mother died shortly after her birth and she did not have a good relationship with her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont.

Distanced herself from her father who disapproved of her relationship with P B Shelley while he was married to Harriet Westbrook. He broke off all ties when she eloped with Shelley, aged only 16, and only restored contact when Mary and P B married after Westbrook’s death.
Met disapproval from many for her unconventional relationship.

Through much of her life had little financial security.

Supported her husband who suffered from ill health.

When Frankenstein was first published it was believed to have been written by a man. When Mary’s authorship as discovered, the novel ceased to be discussed in terms of its political commentary and more in terms of its success as a romance.

Suffered from depression at different times in her life particularly after the deaths of her children, family members and her husband.

Returned to England from abroad as a condition imposed by her father-in-law Sir Timothy Shelley, for supporting her son Percy Florence. Sir Timothy withdrew this allowance on the publication of Posthumous Poems, prohibiting further publication of P B Shelley’s works which Mary subsequently found ways of evading.

Connection to Bloomsbury

1815 – 1816 Lived at 87 Marchmont Street.

Blue plaque erected on 19th December 2009 by The Marchmont Association at 87-89 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AL Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Female Networks

Caroline Norton, Frances Wright, Isabella Baxter Booth, Lady Sydney Morgan (née Owenson), Mary Cowden Clarke, Mary Lamb.

Selected Works

1808 Mounseer Nongtongpaw

1817 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour published anonymously

1818 (revised 1831) Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

1823 Valperga

1826 The Last Man

1830 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck

1835 Lodore

1837 Falkner

1844 Rambles in Germany and Italy