Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on the 30th of August, 1797. “Two angels, one of Life and one of Death,” together entered the door of William Godwin. Long after, Shelley wrote:

“They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents thou aspiring child:
I wonder not—for One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory.”

A spirit akin to that of Greek tragedy informs the double story of mother and daughter. Mary Godwin inherited her fate. The peculiar reverence in which she must necessarily have held the mother who had died to give her life, the implicit confidence with which she must have received that mother’s doctrines, as set forth in her life and preserved in her books,—this was the strongest determining influence in the life of the girl, Mary Godwin. When, at the age of seventeen, she unhesitatingly plighted her faith to a man already bound by the laws of society to another, there is significance in the fact that their hands were clasped over her mother’s grave—the spot which a woman of opposite traditions must have shunned with shame at such a moment. That sacred place seemed fittest for the strange betrothal of Mary Godwin, who had no doubt that the mother who there slept would have smiled upon the lovers. Censure of this step has properly no place in a sketch of Mary Godwin Shelley; the entire responsibility rests with Shelley and her parents; her action was simply an inevitable result.

From July 28, 1814, till the fatal 8th of the same month in 1822, her life was one with Shelley’s. Immeasurably greater as he was, we may yet claim for his wife that she influenced his genius in one respect and in one instance: it was her persuasion that led him, in ‘The Cenci,’ closer to realities, and she regarded that work as a promise of the warmer grasp of human interests on his part that might at last “touch the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen.”

She was formally married to Shelley in 1816, on the death of Harriet Shelley. Robbed of her husband by death in 1822, Mary returned to London in the following year for the sake of Percy, her only surviving child. Her own wishes would have led her to remain in Italy. For some time she resided with her father, but subsequently removed to Kentish Town, and then to Harrow, that she might be near her boy at school.

Frankenstein had been published in 1818; and Godwin saw in it that power which induced him to advise her, in this her time of need, to turn to literature as a resource. She worked hard with her pen to meet the expenses of her son’s education, and also contributed to the support of Godwin, now old and failing. She sent her father, at a time when he was greatly embarrassed, her novel Valperga in MS., begging him to publish it and use the proceeds as his own. The generosity of this gift reminds us of her dead mother. This novel was published in 1823; The Last Man, in 1824; Perkin Warbeck, in 1830; Lodore, in 1835; and Falkner, in 1837. Mrs. Shelley also wrote most of the Italian and Spanish lives in Lardner’s Encyclopedia, and two volumes of travels entitled Rambles in Germany and Italy; and edited (1839-40) Shelley’s works and his letters, by far her most important service to literature. Her son became Sir Percy Shelley on the death of his grandfather in 1844.

On the 21st of February, 1851, Mary Shelley closed a life that long had “crept on a broken wing.” We may believe that she rejoiced at the coming of the hour, when, in Shelley’s own words, “Life should no more divide what death could join together.”

She appears to have differed from her mother in possessing a greater delicacy, more imaginativeness, something less of intellectual boldness and independence. She had, however, all Mary Wollstonecraft’s tendency to melancholy: “I fear you are a Wollstonecraft,” the equable Godwin wrote her. She endeavored, in her happier days, to guard against this evil by mingling in society, where she was animated and charming. Henry Crabb Robinson mentions her at Godwin’s in 1823, looking “elegant and sickly and young”; one calls to mind the description of Shelley, “like some elegant flower drooping on its stem.” Robinson also relates what he had heard from Harriet Martineau, that Mrs. Shelley “never had asked a favor of any one, and never would.” This is a touch of her mother’s pride, intensified.

Your enquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797, and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led me to choose this was, the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. The present Mrs. Godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither Mrs. Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly endeavor, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind and characters of the younger branches of our family.

Of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in every thing she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny[5] is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing.

William Godwin: Letter to an unknown correspondent, in ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries,’ by C. Kegan Paul, Boston: Roberts Bros., 1876.

Mrs. Godwin [formerly Mrs. Clairmont], was a harsh stepmother.... She had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite duties, with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education and even accomplishments which their slender means would admit; while household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin. That Mary Shelley was afterward a worthy intellectual companion to Shelley, is in no degree due to Mrs. Godwin, and little to her father’s direct teaching. All the education she had up to the time when she linked her fate with Shelley’s, was self-gained; the merits of such a work as ‘Frankenstein’ were her own; the faults were those of her home-training.

C. Kegan Paul: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’

When we reached Skinner Street, he [Shelley] said, “I must speak with Godwin; come in, I will not detain you long.” I followed him through the shops, which was the only entrance, and up stairs. We entered a room on the first floor; it was shaped like a quadrant. In the arc were windows; in one radius a fire-place, and in the other a door, and shelves with many old books. William Godwin was not at home. Bysshe strode about the room, causing the crazy floor of the ill-built dwelling-house to shake and tremble under his impatient footsteps.... I stood reading the names of old English authors on the backs of the venerable volumes, when the door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called “Shelley!” A thrilling voice answered “Mary!” And he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time, had called him out of the room. He was absent a very short time—a minute or two; and then returned. “Godwin is out; there is no use in waiting.”

Thomas Jefferson Hogg: ‘Life of Shelley,’ 1858; quoted by R. H. Stoddard. ‘Anecdote Biography of Shelley.’ New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877.

It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, when he found the child whom he had scarcely noticed two years before, had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers.... Shelley came to London on May 18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that it was to be a final separation from him, though the relations between husband and wife had for some time been increasingly unhappy. He was received in Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary. Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of the Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister and their friend. Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at any other time, used judiciously. It was easy for the lovers, for such they became before they were aware of it, to meet without the attention of the parents being drawn to the increasing intimacy, and yet without any such sense of clandestine interviews, as might have disclosed to themselves whither they were drifting. Mary was unhappy at home; she thoroughly disliked Mrs. Godwin, to whom Fanny was far more tolerant; her desire for knowledge and love of reading were discouraged, and when seen with a book in her hand, she was wont to hear from her stepmother that her proper sphere was the store-room. Old St. Pancras church-yard was then a quiet and secluded spot, where Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave was shaded by a fine weeping-willow. Here Mary Godwin used to take her books in the warm days of June, to spend every hour she could call her own. Here her intimacy with Shelley ripened, and here, in Lady Shelley’s words, “she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortunes with his own.”

On July 28th, early in the morning, Mary Godwin left her father’s house, accompanied by Jane Clairmont. They joined Shelley, posted to Dover, and crossed in an open boat to Calais during a violent storm.... The three went to Paris, where they bought a donkey, and rode him in turns to Geneva, the others walking. Sleeping now in a cabaret and now in a cottage, they at last finished this strange honeymoon, and the strangest sentimental journey ever undertaken since Adam and Eve went forth with all the world before them where to choose.

C. Kegan Paul: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’

The theories in which the daughter of the authors of ‘Political Justice’ and of the ‘Rights of Woman’ had been educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she loved—by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to venerate—these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was, therefore, natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her love.

Lady Shelley: ‘Shelley Memorials, from Authentic Sources.’ London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875.

It is remarkable that her youth was not the period of her greatest beauty, and certainly at that date [1816-17] she did not do justice to herself either in her aspect or in the tone of her conversation. She was singularly pale. With a figure that needed to be set off, she was careless in her dress; and the decision of purpose which ultimately gained her the title of ‘Wilful Woman,’ then appeared, at least in society, principally in the negative form—her temper being easily crossed, and her resentments taking a somewhat querulous and peevish tone.

Thornton Hunt: ‘Shelley,’ in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1863.

I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. [Frankenstein] is the only one which has been completed.

Mary Shelley: First Preface to ‘Frankenstein.’ Boston: Sever, Francis & Co., 1869.

I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.... I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others, the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.... Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I had placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.... I opened my eyes in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and the high white Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story—my tiresome, unlucky ghost story. Swift as light, and as cheering, was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it!”

... On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, “It was on a dreary night in November,” making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

Mary Shelley: Second Preface to ‘Frankenstein.’

The most striking feature in her face was her calm, gray eyes; she was rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old writers.

E. J. Trelawny: ‘Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron.’ Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1858.

It is clear that the society of Shelley was to her a great school, which she did not appreciate to the full until most calamitously it was taken away; and yet, of course, she could not fail to learn the greater part of what it had become to her. This again showed itself even in her appearance, after she had spent some years in Italy; for, while she had grown far more comely than she was in her mere youth, she had acquired a deeper insight into many subjects that interested Shelley, and some others; and she had learned to express the force of natural affection, which she was born to feel, but which had somehow been stunted and suppressed in her youth.

She was a woman of extraordinary power, of heart as well as head. Many circumstances conspired to conceal some of her natural faculties.... Her father—speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and imperfect knowledge—appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man. She inherited from him her thin voice,[6] but not the steel-edged sharpness of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her mind. She had a masculine capacity for study; for, though I suspect her early schooling was irregular, she remained a student all her life, and by painstaking industry made herself acquainted with any subject that she had to handle.

Thornton Hunt: ‘Shelley.’

In looking over the journal in which, from day to day, Mrs. Shelley was in the habit of noting their occupations, as well as passing events, one is struck with wonder at the number of books which they read in the course of the year. At home or traveling—before breakfast, or waiting for the mid-day meal—by the side of a stream, or on the ascent of a mountain—a book was never absent from the hands of one or the other: and there were never two books; one read while the other listened.

Lady Shelley: ‘Shelley Memorials.’

We suffered a severe affliction in Rome [in 1819] by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss.

Some friends of ours were residing in the neighborhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fire-flies flashed from among the myrtle hedges:—nature was bright, sunshiny and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed. At the top of the house there was a sort of terrace ... very small, yet not only roofed but glazed; this Shelley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea.... In the spring [of 1820, having passed the winter in Florence and Pisa] we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.

The bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and divided by a rocky promontory into a larger and smaller one. The town of Lerici is situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the smaller bay, which bears the name of this town, is the village of Sant’ Arenzo. Our house, Casa Magni, was close to this village; the sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The proprietor ... had rooted up the olives on the hillside, and planted forest trees; ... some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was indeed of unimaginable beauty; the blue extent of waters, the almost land-locked bay, the near castle of Lerici, shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, over which there was only a winding rugged foot-path towards Lerici, and none on the other side; the tideless sea leaving no sands nor shingle—formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes only: sometimes the sunshine vanished when the sirocco raged—the ponente, the wind was called on that shore. The gales and squalls, that hailed our first arrival, surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship. At other times sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian heaven bathed the scene. The natives were wilder than the place.... If ever fate whispered of coming disaster, such inaudible, but not unfelt, prognostics hovered around us. The beauty of the place seemed unearthly in its excess: the distance we were at from all signs of civilization, the sea at our feet, its murmurs or its roarings forever in our ears—all these things led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. A sort of spell surrounded us, and each day, as the voyagers did not return, we grew restless and disquieted; and yet, strange to say, we were not fearful of the most apparent danger.

The spell snapped, it was all over; an interval of agonizing doubt was changed to the certainty of the death that eclipsed all happiness for the survivors forevermore.

Mary Shelley: Notes, in ‘Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1857.

She impressed me as a person with warm social feelings, dependent for happiness on loving encouragement, needing a guiding and sustaining hand.

In person she was of middle height and graceful figure. Her face, though not regularly beautiful, was comely and spiritual, of winning expression, and with a look of inborn refinement; as well as culture. It had a touch of sadness when at rest.

Robert Dale Owen: Quoted in ‘Heroines of Free Thought,’ S. A. Underhill. New York: Charles P. Somerby, 139 Eighth Street, 1876.

I have heard her accused of an over-anxiety to be admired; and something of the sort was discernible in society: it was a weakness as venial as it was purely superficial. Away from society she was as truthful and simple a woman as I have ever met—was as faithful a friend as the world has produced—using that unreserved directness toward those whom she regarded with affection, which is the very crowning glory of friendly intercourse. I suspect that these qualities came out in their greatest force after her calamity; for many things which she said in her regret, and passages in Shelley’s own poetry, make me doubt whether little habits of temper, and possibly of a refined and exacting coquettishness, had not prevented him from acquiring so full a knowledge of her as she had of him.

Thornton Hunt: ‘Shelley.’

Her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that time allowed to be cut low, and which her own taste adopted (for she never wore the conventional “widow’s weeds” and “widow’s cap”); her thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved mouth, with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility while speaking; her exquisitely formed, white, dimpled, small hands, with rosy palms, and plumply commencing fingers, that tapered into tips as slender and delicate as those in a Vandyck portrait—all remain palpably present to memory. Another peculiarity in Mrs. Shelley’s hand was its singular flexibility, which permitted her bending the fingers back so as almost to approach the portion of her arm above her wrist. She once did this smilingly and repeatedly, to amuse the girl who was noting its whiteness and pliancy, and who now, as an old woman, records its remarkable beauty.

Very sweet and very encouraging was Mary Shelley to her young namesake, Mary Victoria, making her proud and happy by giving her a presentation copy of her wonderful book, ‘Frankenstein,’ and pleasing her girlish fancy by the gift of a string of cut-coral graduated beads from Italy....

Her mode of uttering the word “Lerici,” dwells upon our memory with peculiarly subdued and lingering intonation, associated as it was with all that was most mournful in connection with that picturesque spot where she learned she had lost her “beloved Shelley” forever from this fair earth.

She was never tired of asking Francesco [Mr. Francis Novello] to sing Mozart’s “Qui Sdegno,” “Possenti Numi,” “Mentre ti Lascio,” “Tuba Mirum,” “La Vendetta,” “Non piu Andrai,” or “Madamina;” so fond was she of his singing her favorite composer.

Mary (Victoria Novello) Cowden Clarke: ‘Recollections of Writers.’ New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

If the reader desires a portrait of Mary, he has one in the well-known antique bust sometimes called “Isis,” and sometimes “Clytie”; a woman’s head and shoulders rising from a lotus-flower. It is most probably the portrait of a Roman lady: is in some degree more elongated and “classic,” than Mary; but, on the other hand, it falls short of her, for it gives no idea of her tall and intellectual forehead, nor has it any trace of the bright, animated, and sweet expression that so often lighted up her face.

Thornton Hunt: ‘Shelley.’

How changed is the taste of verse, prose, and painting, since le bon vieux temps, dear madam! Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and is within—if within—a hair’s breadth of positive disgust. Some of the strange things they write remind me of Squoire Richard’s visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says: “Odd, they are pure grim devils,”—particularly a wild and hideous tale called ‘Frankenstein.’

Mrs. Piozzi: Letters to Mme. D’Arblay, in the latter’s ‘Diary and Letters’; edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1880.

The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet, allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of Frankenstein’s experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves.... It is no slight merit in our eyes that the tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his[7] descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. The self-education of the monster, considering the slender opportunities of acquiring knowledge that he possessed, we have already noticed as improbable and over-strained.

Sir Walter Scott: ‘Remarks on Frankenstein,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March, 1818. (‘Scott’s Miscellanies,’ vol. i. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841.)

Mrs. Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ ... he [Charles Lamb] thought the most extraordinary realization of the idea of a being out of nature which had ever been effected.

Thomas Noon Talfourd: ‘The Works of Charles Lamb, His Letters, and a Sketch of his Life.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1838.

We have spoken of Mrs. Shelley’s similarity in genius to her husband’s—we by no means think her his equal. She has not his subtlety, swiftness, wealth of imagination, and is never caught up (like Ezekiel by his lock of hair) into the same rushing whirlwind of inspiration. She has much, however, of his imaginative and of his speculative qualities—her tendency, like his, is to the romantic, the ethereal, and the terrible. The tie detaining her, as well as him to the earth, is slender—her protest against society is his, copied out in a female hand—her style is carefully and successfully modeled upon his—she bears in brief, to him, the resemblance which Laone did to Laon, which Astarte did to Manfred.... Perhaps, indeed, intercourse with a being so peculiar ... has somewhat affected the originality, and narrowed the extent of her own genius.

Mrs. Shelley’s genius, though true and powerful, is monotonous and circumscribed—more so than even her father’s—and, in this point, presents a strong contrast to her husband’s. She has no wit, nor humor—little dramatic talent. Strong, clear description of the gloomier scenes of nature, or the darker passions of the mind, or of those supernatural objects which her fancy, except in her first work, somewhat laboriously creates, is her forte. Hence her reputation still rests upon ‘Frankenstein’; ... she unquestionably made him, but he has had no progeny.

... She has succeeded in her delineation; she has painted this shapeless being upon the imagination of the world forever; and beside Caliban, and Hecate, and Death and Life, and all other weird and gloomy creations, this nameless, unfortunate, involuntary, gigantic unit stands.

... The work is wonderful as the work of a girl of eighteen. One distinct addition to our original creations must be conceded her—and it is no little praise.

George Gilfillan: ‘A Second Gallery of Literary Portraits.’ Edinburgh: James Hogg. London: R. Groombridge & Sons, 1850.