Her mother died in childbirth. Their high expectations of her future are, perhaps, indicated by their blessing her upon her birth with both their names. [197], Mary Shelley believed in the Enlightenment idea that people could improve society through the responsible exercise of political power, but she feared that the irresponsible exercise of power would lead to chaos. Jul 8, 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley Dies Percy Shelley drowns in … This generation experienced much of their youth during the Great Depression and rapid technological innovation such as the radio and the telephone. With much of the independent spirit that drove her mother, Mary left home when she was 16 to live with her lover, Percy Shelley, who was unhappily married at the time. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. Her illicit affair with the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley had seen them escape from England to Villa Diodati, a large house near Lake Geneva. During the summer of 1812, Shelley went to Scotland to stay with an acquaintance of her father William Baxter and his family. [241] Shelley emphasises domesticity, romance, family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives of her subjects. In Rambles, Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour in mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of sensibility and sympathy. [213], However, in the last decade or so this view has been challenged. See also. They maintained their intense programme of reading and writing, and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock. It is therefore in public histories alone that we find an account of the last years of the life of Castruccio. [136], Mary Shelley continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. [274] In recent decades, the republication of almost all her writing has stimulated a new recognition of its value. [254] She inserted romantic anecdotes of his benevolence, domesticity, and love of the natural world. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Frankenstein. See Mary Shelley's letter to Isabella Hoppner, 10 August 1821, "Establishing Elena Adelaide's parentage is one of the greatest bafflements Shelley left for his biographers." [97] Biographers have offered various interpretations of these events: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise's by Byron. The creature in Frankenstein, for example, reads books associated with radical ideals but the education he gains from them is ultimately useless. She was in fact challenging the political and literary influences of her circle in her first work. Shelley returned to the Baxters' home the following year. [18] To Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic. [142] He was devoted to his mother, and after he left university in 1841, he came to live with her. Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 210. Payne fell in love with her and in 1826 asked her to marry him. [144] For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped. [51] With a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-storey cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Hofkosh, "Disfiguring Economies" (OMS), 207, 213. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realized that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today. English novelist Mary Shelley is best known for writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and for her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Mary Godwin read these memoirs and her mother's books, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. To avoid confusion, this article calls her "Claire" throughout. During the summer, she began writing "The Wrongs of Women: or Maria". Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. Mellor, "Making a 'monster'" (CC), 14; Blumberg, 54; Mellor, 70. Do thou return for mine. In 1820, she was thrilled by the Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution. Adult Written byFallenMuse September 8, 2020. age 17+ PG-13 my a$$! [143] In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower", as Mary put it. Mary Shelley's Career Highlights. [257] Working from Percy's messy, sometimes indecipherable, notebooks, she attempted to form a chronology for his writings, and she included poems, such as Epipsychidion, addressed to Emilia Viviani, which she would rather have left out. ", Sites, Melissa. She acknowledges the mentally stimulating role a father plays in the development of a daughter, presumably speaking from personal experience. William and Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were both: influential authors activist and risk-taking engaged to social non-conformity Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin symbol of equality intellectual inheritance Father of philosophical anarchism born into a family of religious Dissenters "[202] Specifically, Mary Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts". [12] Godwin was saved from debtor's prison by philosophical devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him further money. In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. AKA Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. There is always this argument between what gives the title of being a parent or if bringing a child into this world is enough to call them our parents. Short Bio » Novelist » Mary Shelley. "[245] However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, effectively banned her from doing so. [10] Mary Godwin, on the other hand, came to detest her stepmother. Mary was paid £500 to edit the Poetical Works (1838), which Sir Timothy insisted should not include a biography. A friend of her son's bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now. Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer who advocated for women's equality. The woman was a neighbor, who Mary never got along with very well. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavours, but concern for her son restricted her options. [115], After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. [163] Some modern critics, such as Patricia Clemit and Jane Blumberg, have taken the same view, resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley's works. He failed his parental obligations to his creation and cannot be given the title of a parent due to that. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Biography and Works Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was born in London. "[276] Scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major Romantic figure, significant for her literary achievement and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.[272]. Seymour, 49. [135] Shelley also assisted Georgiana Paul, a woman disallowed for by her husband for alleged adultery. He had been out sailing with a friend in the Gulf of Spezia. She wrote the novels The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). She wrote to Leigh Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines. Holmes, 725; Sunstein, 217–18; Seymour, 270–73. [99] The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils,[100] remain shrouded in mystery. Clairmont brought her own two children into the union, and she and Godwin later had a son together. Birthday: August 30, 1797 Birthplace: London, England, U.K. Star Sign: Virgo Profession: Novelist Died: February 1, 1851. Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schorr, eds. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. ", "Frankenstein at 200: Why Hasn't Mary Shelley Been Given the Respect She Deserves? They were also accompanied by Lord Byron, a poet and his personal physician, John Polidori. Sure, but that’s not his fault. When I give talks about Mary and the nine years of her relationship with her poet, Shelley, I quite often hear someone automatically dismissing any deep sympathy. ", This page was last edited on 5 January 2021, at 20:30. She wrote about the horrors of mankind, painted the grimmest of settings in her writing, and lived a life full of mystery and tragedy. Letter to Maria Gisborne, 30 October – 17 November 1834. [231][note 16] She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes associated with Percy Shelley. [121], In the summer of 1824, Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London to be near Jane Williams. And left me in this dreary world alone? She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist and journalist William Godwin. The group entertained themselves one rainy day by reading a book of ghost stories. "[17], In June 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. [5] A year after Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. [183], Feminist critics often focus on how authorship itself, particularly female authorship, is represented in and through Shelley's novels. In 1814, Shelley began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Mary got a great education, something most girls did not have at the time. [192] The novel's resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures. She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but since retracted. She was also … Mary Wollestonecraft (Godwin) Shelley was born on August 30, 1797 in London, England to philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollestonecraft; both her parents were noted writers in the 1800s. It was at this time that Mary Shelley began work on what would become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Blumberg, 47; see also 86–87 for a similar discussion of Castruccio in. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53. Sadly for Shelley, she never really knew her mother who died shortly after her birth. "[68] Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress."[69]. "[269] It was not until Emily Sunstein's Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality in 1989 that a full-length scholarly biography was published. One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living in Venice. A clear picture of Mary Shelley's relationship with Beauclerk is difficult to reconstruct from the evidence. Shelley was born on August 30 and Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks later. Her family was of reputable status, as both her parents were prominent members of the Enlightenment movement. That same year, the Shelleys moved to Italy. She was married to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. [235] Until the republication of these essays in 2002, their significance within her body of work was not appreciated. [50], The loss of her child induced acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of the baby; but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse,' as well as pioneering feminist texts, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas.'. Sunstein, 70–75; Seymour, 88; St. Clair, 329–35. (246), Sunstein speculates that Mary Shelley and Jefferson Hogg made love in April 1815. As Bennett explains, "biographers and critics agree that Mary Shelley's commitment to bring Shelley the notice she believed his works merited was the single, major force that established Shelley's reputation during a period when he almost certainly would have faded from public view". The Italian adventure was, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children—Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome. However, because the Memoirs revealed Wollstonecraft's affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. © 2021 Biography and the Biography logo are registered trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC. Her father was philosopher William Godwin and her mother was feminist Mary Wollstonecraft , who died just ten days after her birth. [145], In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. [201], As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, The Last Man, more so than Frankenstein, "in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism. [30] Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father",[31] was confused. [229] Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view",[230] she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy. [41] The couple's distraught letters reveal their pain at these separations.[42]. Her son and daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, had the bodies of her parents exhumed and buried them with her in the churchyard of St. Peter's, Bournemouth. While some may simply know her as the woman who wrote Frankenstein, there’s more to her story. "The Real Doctor Frankenstein? In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Marsluys, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Leigh Hunt, worked hard at their writing, and often discussed politics. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was raised by a single parent, her father William Godwin. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed.[26]. The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley's Novel, 1816–17 (Parts One and Two)", "Archival material relating to Mary Shelley", Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley manuscript material, 1815–1850, Exhibits relating to Mary Shelley at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" (2020 TV episode), Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Frankenstein vs. the Creature from Blood Cove, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, Wolfstein, The Murderer; or, The Secrets of a Robber's Cave, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mary_Shelley&oldid=998532721, Women science fiction and fantasy writers, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, Pages using Sister project links with wikidata mismatch, Pages using Sister project links with default search, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. [236][note 17] In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich, they reveal Mary Shelley's "prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages", her gift for biographical narrative, and her interest in the "emerging forms of feminist historiography". [267] In fact, in the introduction to her letters published in 1945, editor Frederick Jones wrote, "a collection of the present size could not be justified by the general quality of the letters or by Mary Shelley's importance as a writer. [93][note 10], In December 1818, the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician. [100] Elena Adelaide Shelley died in Naples on 9 June 1820. After her death, her son Percy and daughter-in-law Jane had Mary Shelley’s parents exhumed from St. Pancras Cemetery in London (which had fallen into neglect over time) and had them reinterred beside Mary at the family’s tomb in St. Peter’s in Bournemouth. The Importance Of Parents In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. [111] On 1 July 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno. The following summer, the Shelleys were in Switzerland with Jane Clairmont, Lord Byron and John Polidori. [2] She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. [123] She also met the American actor John Howard Payne and the American writer Washington Irving, who intrigued her. "[19] Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, to remove her from the seamy side of business, or to introduce her to radical politics. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school, and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow. [108] All was not well between the couple that summer, however, and Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and debilitated wife. The first and most memorable work of Mary Shelley is her creation of Frankenstein, which she wrote during the summer of 1816 and published in 1818. Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St Pancras Churchyard, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. (Sunstein, 98–99), The violent storms were, it is now known, a repercussion of the volcanic eruption of. Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. By 1837, Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired. 8 Fun facts … "[215] In this reading, Shelley's early works are interpreted as a challenge to Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley's radicalism. Moskal, "Travel writing" (CC), 244; Clemit, "Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft" (CC), 30. [67], Early in the summer of 1817, Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in January 1818. [132] Throughout this period, she also championed Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878) praised Percy Shelley at the expense of Mary, questioning her intelligence and even her authorship of Frankenstein. On 10 December, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London. [86] The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on 12 November 1819, finally lifted her spirits,[87] though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born in 1797 to William Godwin, a British philosopher and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a British author and feminist. She was, though, an instinctive and devoted mother. Bunnell, 132; Lynch, "Historical novelist" (CC), 143–44; see also Lew, "God's Sister" (OMS), 164–65. Seymour argues that evidence from Polidori's diary conflicts with Mary Shelley's account of when the idea came to her (157). A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. Birthplace: London, England Location of death: London, England Cause of death: Cancer - Brain Rema. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein . Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's plan, but how seriously she took it is unclear. Seriously. Spark, 41–46; Seymour, 126–27; Sunstein, 98–99. Mary Shelley was born in London on August 30, 1797. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 230–31, 233, 237; Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction". Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, authored A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) and was an early advocate of sexual equality. [124] Payne accepted the rejection and tried without success to talk his friend Irving into proposing himself. By James Northcote (1746-1831) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Inspirations. Shelley never got along with her stepmother. Medwin is the source for the theory that the child registered by Percy Shelley in Naples was his daughter by a mystery woman. [263] Mary Shelley's omissions provoked criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy Shelley's former circle,[264] and reviewers accused her of, among other things, indiscriminate inclusions. [173] In Perkin Warbeck, Shelley's other historical novel, Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity, and equality. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. [149][note 15]. Her career was all about writing novels, treaties, travel narratives, the history of the French Revolution, conduct books, and a children’s book. [176] She argues that the novel is a "birth myth" in which Shelley comes to terms with her guilt for causing her mother's death as well as for failing as a parent. Sunstein, 129; St Clair, 414–15; Seymour, 176. English novelist Mary Shelley is best known for writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and for her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). [4], Together, the Godwins started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books as well as stationery, maps, and games. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. [181] Poovey suggests that Frankenstein's multiple narratives enable Shelley to split her artistic persona: she can "express and efface herself at the same time". Paley, "Apocalypse without Millennium" (OMS), 111–21; Mellor, 159. Mary Shelley was born in 1790s. [73] Both suicides were hushed up. Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori,[55] and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. Mary wrote Valperga to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy refused to assist him further. It is as the wife of [Percy Bysshe Shelley] that she excites our interest. Mary Shelley's birth, upbringing and education. In 1984, Mary Poovey influentially identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic. [64][note 6]. Later Years. [225] The perspective of the History is philosophical and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it addresses the effects of politics and war on France. [203] As in Frankenstein, Shelley "offers a profoundly disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution, which ends in a total rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation". Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer, advocate for women’s rights, and a philosopher who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman calling for women to get a fair education in order to rise in society. Her father William Godwin was left to care for Shelley and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay. [188] Shelley was "profoundly committed to an ethic of cooperation, mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice". [62] It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream", her ghost story:[63], I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. These formed part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, one of the best of many such series produced in the 1820s and 1830s in response to growing middle-class demand for self-education. Bio Synopsis. She was born to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin who were literarily and politically active. [270], The attempts of Mary Shelley's son and daughter-in-law to "Victorianise" her memory by censoring biographical documents contributed to a perception of Mary Shelley as a more conventional, less reformist figure than her works suggest. Either before or during the journey, she had become pregnant. [112] On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boatboy, Charles Vivian. [125], In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as husband and wife. Percy Shelley therefore had difficulty gaining access to money until he inherited his estate, because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice". However, the business did not turn a profit, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going. Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 198. Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 194; Fraistat, "Shelley Left and Right". She became particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos and of Jane and Edward Williams. [53], In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. Generation also known as The Greatest Generation. She explains that "the annuals were a major mode of literary production in the 1820s and 1830s", with The Keepsake the most successful. [259] According to Wolfson, Donald Reiman, a modern editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works, still refers to Mary Shelley's editions, while acknowledging that her editing style belongs "to an age of editing when the aim was not to establish accurate texts and scholarly apparatus but to present a full record of a writer's career for the general reader". Marriage. [78] At Marlow, Mary edited the joint journal of the group's 1814 Continental journey, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, along with Percy's poem "Mont Blanc". [55] The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalised several times and formed the basis for a number of films. [162] William Godwin regarded his daughter's characters as types rather than portraits from real life. On their return to England in September, Mary and Percy moved—with Claire Clairmont, who took lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire's pregnancy secret. 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The cremated remains of her father 's extensive library supporter of both utilitarianism and.. Death, the eagerness and ardour with which he was still the wife of army... Sank during a storm near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici 's.! 245 ] however, Shelley was born, short story writer, was the baby 's mother died than... Summer in Switzerland with Jane Clairmont, Lord Byron, a woman disallowed for by her father 's financial,. Her writing [ 42 ] family rift Female History in Mary Shelley 's first tasks on arriving in Italy to.