In less than two weeks, the mother was dead.
Little Mary grew up surrounded by the intellectual and literary figures who made up her father's social circle. Except for difficulty in getting along with the woman her father married when she was four, Mary grew up fairly happy, close to her half-sister Frances and stepsister Clara (better known as Fanny and Claire).
And then, when Mary was a teenager, she met and fell in love with a radical poet, a young man from the landed gentry. His name was Percy, and when he and Mary fell in love, he was already married. To escape his wife and the scrutiny of society, the young couple ran off to the Continent, taking Claire with them.
Things only went downhill from there.
Finances were bad for the trio, as their families would have nothing to do with them. Finally, they were forced to return to England where Mary gave birth prematurely to a little girl. The baby died after a few weeks. Almost a year later Mary and Percy would have another baby, a little boy. They named him William, after Mary's father. About four months after that, the little family headed off to Switzerland. They would stay there near Lake Geneva, visiting with a friend of Percy's, a fellow poet named George. Claire went along, as she had recently been carrying on an affair with George and was pregnant.
While they stayed at the lake, the little group of Mary, Percy, Claire, George, and George's doctor John spent hours writing and discussing all sorts of things. At some points their conversation turned to science and to the possibility of returning life to dead matter. They also passed much time reading tales of horror and ghosts. Eventually, the idea was put forth that they each should write a horror tale of their own. Only Mary and John ever completed theirs. Mary's tale, a novel of life created and destroyed, became perhaps one of the most famous tales of horror and science fiction of all time.
You probably know how the story turns out. Mary, born Mary Godwin, wrote the novel Frankenstein between 1816 and 1817. In that same time period Fanny, Mary's older half-sister, committed suicide, as did Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet. The death of Harriet allowed Mary and Percy to wed.
At the beginning of 1817, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont gave birth to a daughter, Alba, later Allegra; that child had, of course, been fathered by George, better known to the ages as Lord Byron. Mary gave birth in late 1817 to a third child, another daughter, named Clara.
Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818. Within a year, Mary and Percy were living in Italy and both of their surviving children were dead.
In 1819 a fourth baby, a son name Percy, brought some joy back into Mary's life. That same year John, Dr. John Polidori, published his work from the Lake Geneva days, The Vampyre, establishing at the same time much of the pattern for the modern vampire. He would die in 1821, with many people believing that the story was the world of Lord Byron. The next year little Allegra, the daughter of Claire and Lord Byron, died of typhus, and Mary suffered a serious, near-fatal miscarriage. Months later Percy drowned in a boating accident along with two other men. Mary returned to England with her son.
The rest of Mary's life was spent writing, editing her husband's collected works, and rehabilitating his reputation. Her son Percy survived to adulthood, inheriting the estate that would have been his father's, and Mary's final years were spent in a fairly comfortable state financially, if not healthwise.
Mary died in 1851, leaving behind a number of novels, journals, and other writings. Of course, her singular legacy, that work for which she will eternally be remembered, is a seminal work of horror that she wrote before she knew just how deeply the horror of life would touch her.
Happy birthday, Mary.
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