Everything I "Learned" About Mary Shelley

...in the last hour.

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CW: A LOT OF GNARLY STUFF.

This morning, on the occasion of her birthday, I decided to look up Mary Shelley, the woman most famous for giving us Frankenstein. What follows is a ranting synopsis of “information” I found exclusively on the community-edited website Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt but also take it seriously enough to be as “WHAT!” as I was while reading.

So, Mary’s mom was a feminist philosopher also named Mary (Wollstonecraft). She wrote a proto-feminist book you may have heard of called A Vindication on the Rights of Woman which argued that women deserved an education. Suffragettes would later pass the book around; it was good. Mary had a friend named Fanny who she was kind of in love with but Fanny wasn’t feeling the vibes so much. So, the elder Mary moved to France during the French Revolution, as one does? Then a bunch of her friends were guillotined. She meets this American guy Gilbert who also moved to France during the French Revolution for some reason and they had an affair at a tollbooth outside of Paris (I don’t know; I’m just telling you what I read) and got pregnant out-of-wedlock. Then Gilbert ditched her and the baby (who she named Fanny, after her crush) in a war zone and Mary tried to kill herself twice but it didn’t work. She wrote Gilbert this suicide note one time:

Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace. When you receive this, my burning head will be cold ... I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek. God bless you! May you never know by experience what you have made me endure. Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.

Can you imagine sending that to someone and then still having to be alive? Then she got pregnant by another American dude named William who was an anarchist and that baby became Mary Shelley! The woman who created Frankenstein!

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London, 1797: Life starts out weird for Mary in that her awesome mom dies of septicemia a week after she’s born. Yikes! So Mary’s now-widowed dad, William, adopts her older half-sister Fanny and raises her alongside Mary. He also writes a biography of his dead wife in which he talks about her sex life and her politics and all kinds of juicy goss. Supposedly it’s a good book that people hated him for at the time. It seems like he really loved her, so that’s sad.

William was friends with Aaron Burr? People like that were always hanging around Mary Shelley’s house when she was growing up. Here’s a weird thing! When she was 15 her dad wrote she was:

…singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.

Can you imagine your dad liking you that much when you were 15? Anyways, a year later she meets this radical atheist poet dude named Percy Shelley. He’s a mess! In his teens he fell in love with his cousin Harriet but it didn’t work out so then he married a woman with the same name after she sent him a bunch of letters threatening to kill herself. (Like I said, I’m just telling you what I read.) So that’s Percy’s first wife, Harriet. They have a baby, Ianthe, which is a cool name. Then Harriet gets pregnant again and Percy gets bored of her and sends the pregnant Harriet and her baby to live with her dad. What a jerk. Just wait, though.

He meets Mary. He and Mary and her step-sister Claire go bopping around Europe and Claire has an affair, and a kid, with Lord Byron. She was also maybe having an affair with Percy? Meanwhile, Percy’s estranged wife has their second kid and promptly kills herself! Which frees him up to wed Mary three weeks later and send his kids off to foster care? Oh, also, Mary’s half-sister Fanny (remember Fanny?) kills herself around this time, too. Wow. But it gets worse!

Over the next few years, Mary has two kids that die and one that doesn’t. Then Percy either gets someone else pregnant and they adopt that kid OR they pick up a baby off the street, no one is sure, but it doesn’t totally matter because they abandon her a few days later in Italy. What was with these people!?

Naturally, Mary is depressed and Percy writes a poem about it:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.

Moving right along: Around this time is when Mary and Percy are hanging out with Lord Byron and they’re all like, “Let’s write ghost stories!” and Mary’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is the clear winner.

At some point, Percy and Mary make friends with a couple called Ed and Jane and Percy falls in love with Jane and writes all kinds of poems about her. Mary has a miscarriage. Then Percy and Ed go on a trip and die in a boating accident that some people think either Percy made happen on purpose because he was suicidal over Jane OR some pirates did it. Don’t feel too bad: he abandoned his kids every chance he got, remember?

So here’s Mary, widowed with a baby, living off an allowance from Percy’s dad. She goes and gets a crush on Jane, too! Nothing happens there except for Mary writing the very first apocalyptic dystopian fiction ever, The Last Man. I liked this book.

A little while later, Mary helps some lesbian friends of hers finagle a marriage and goes to visit them in Paris where she contracts smallpox. She lives, but apparently looks terrible from then on which is a rude detail we don’t really need in this story!

She writes a bunch more books, edits a ton of stuff including her late husband’s unpublished works, and three dudes try to blackmail her by saying they have racy letters she’s written or might publish tell-alls. She fends them off.

AND THEN SHE DIES OF A BRAIN TUMOR AT 53.

OK, admittedly none of the Wikipedia entries match up in terms of dates and places and the rumors change depending on the point of view, but since she’s been dead for 170 years, let’s not worry a super-ton about accuracy here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Mary Shelley!