WRITER ENGLANDBeware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
—FROM MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN
Mary closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. She was worried. All her friends had shared their ghost stories already; she was the only one left who hadn’t met the challenge. She didn’t want them to think she couldn’t do it; she didn’t want to seem like a less-talented writer.
As she drifted off, images swirled through her mind. These visions seemed different than her regular dreams. More real. Eventually, one image stayed.
A pale young man kneeled beside a bed. In the bed lay another figure.
Mary trembled in her sleep, for the figure was hideous and unnatural.
It was a giant man with black hair, yellow skin stretched tight over nearly visible muscles and arteries, and dull, milky eyes that stared lifelessly.
In her dream state, Mary knew that the first man was a student who had created the second man.
As the student worked a powerful engine, the monster stirred to life. The student, terrified by his success, fled the machine and went to bed. He slept but was awakened by a noise. When he opened his eyes, his monster was standing beside the bed, staring at him with those same dull eyes. It was alive!
Mary jerked awake, shaking from the terror of her nightmare. She tried to go back to sleep, but the horrifying images wouldn’t leave. The young writer thought to herself, If only I could come up with a story to frighten readers as I’ve just been frightened!
And then it hit her: the nightmare was her story!
Eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley had just dreamed up Frankenstein. It would become one of the most famous stories of all time.
Mary Shelley was born in London, England, to two famous thinkers and writers of the time. Her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher who argued that the wealthy aristocracy should not control politics—that everyone should have that power. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist who argued for equality of the sexes in a time when women couldn’t vote or own property and had few education and work opportunities. Both parents were controversial figures with radical ideas and their daughter grew up to be just as notorious.
Mary’s father taught her to read in the cemetery, using her mother’s gravestone. She learned her letters by tracing her mother’s epitaph with her fingers.1
Mary’s mother died just after giving birth to her. Her father raised her, providing Mary with an informal but rich and varied education. When Mary was eight, her father started a publishing company that produced mostly children’s books. Their home was filled with writers and artists and thinkers, so it isn’t much of a surprise that Mary began writing at a young age. “As a child, I scribbled; and my favorite pastime during the hours given to me for recreation was to ‘write stories,’ ” she explained.2
Mary’s father was usually broke and didn’t feel he could raise his children alone, so he remarried a wealthy widow. But Mary and her new stepmother didn’t get along; the two competed for her father’s affections. Mary’s teen years were especially tense—so much so that Godwin sent her to Scotland to live with a family he’d never met but knew only through letters. The travel and freedom from family gave Mary more independence and courage than her father ever imagined.
Free love? No one knows exactly what the relationship was between Shelley and Claire, but we know Claire was also attracted to Shelley and that Mary was jealous. We also know the trio liked to read aloud from The Empire of the Nairs about a community where women had equal rights, sex was free and uninhibited, and no one wore any clothes! What is known is that the trio traveled and lived together for years.3
Because of his debts, Godwin was constantly looking for investors. One of these potential investors was Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet and the son of a wealthy British family. Shelley was also a radical who wanted to donate large amounts of his family’s fortune to help those less fortunate. He had been expelled from Oxford for writing an essay called “The Necessity of Atheism,” and his poetry was political as well, attacking the monarchy, war, and religion.
In 1814, after returning from Scotland, Mary met Shelley at the Godwin home. Shelley was everything Mary wanted in a man: an artist, a revolutionary, and someone who could free her from her family. For weeks, they met secretly at Mary’s mother’s grave, where they read her political writings to each other and fell in love.
When they announced to Mary’s father that they were in love and intended to travel together to Europe, he was furious. Mary was sixteen and Shelley was twenty-one. Even worse, Shelley was already married and his wife was pregnant! When her father tried to keep the lovers apart, Mary and her stepsister, Claire, dressed in black dresses and bonnets and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. They joined Shelley and sailed a small boat to Calais, France.
In France, Mary and Shelley kept a joint journal, read aloud to each other, and critiqued each other’s writing—a working relationship that would continue for years. Their antiwar beliefs were also strengthened as they traveled through war-torn France. Mary wrote in her journal, “The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war . . . which, in his pride, man inflicts upon his fellow.”4
During their six-week trip, they had no money. Mary’s family was poor and wouldn’t have helped her anyway, so Shelley had to borrow against his future inheritance. They scraped together enough to buy a mule to carry their luggage, which they later traded for a cheap open carriage. They ran out of money entirely in Switzerland but managed to convince a ship captain to take them home without paying for their tickets. Shelley’s wife, Harriet, had to pay the bill—for Mary and Claire as well—when they arrived back in London!5
Percy and Mary were part of what was later called the Romantic Movement. The art of the time, including their poetry and prose, is characterized by valuing intense emotion (including horror and terror), nature, and the individual. It was the liberal, radical viewpoint of the time.
And they arrived back to an epic scandal. Unwed, teenage Mary was pregnant with Shelley’s child. London society and their families shunned them. Mary’s beloved father refused to let her into their house and ignored her on the street! She was devastated.
Life for the couple worsened. Unable to borrow from his family, Shelley was constantly on the move to avoid creditors. Mary had to live with Claire, whom Mary knew had feelings for Shelley. And while Shelley’s wife, Harriet, gave birth to his son, Mary miscarried their daughter.
The next year was a bit better. Mary and Shelley were able to move in together, and Mary got pregnant again and gave birth to their son William. Claire began an affair with an even more famous poet, Lord Byron (see the Ada Lovelace chapter) and invited herself to visit him in Europe. When Byron said yes, the trio set off again, hoping to recapture the magic of their earlier adventure.
In May 1816, Mary, Shelley, their son William, and stepsister Claire traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, where they joined Lord Byron in a large villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. It was a rainy summer, which trapped them indoors much of the time.
One dark and rainy June night, Byron proposed a contest: they should each compose a ghost story and share it with the group. Each night, someone shared a tale—everyone but Mary. She couldn’t think of anything! It was stressing her out. Then one night, as she drifted to sleep, she had a nightmare: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out . . .”6 She awoke terrified and knew she had the start of her story.
Although Mary claimed she invented the name Frankenstein, she had visited Castle Frankenstein in Germany during her 1814 trip. The castle had been home to Doctor Johann Conrad Dippel, who was infamous for his attempts to reanimate corpses!7
Eighteen-year-old Mary worked on her short story for the rest of the summer, expanding it into a novel. She set the tale amid the great, desolate Swiss mountains surrounding them and incorporated the scientific discoveries she had discussed with her friends—the spark of life and the possibility of using electricity to reanimate the dead. She also worked in themes of slavery, social justice, class, and even the abandonment she felt as a young girl.
At the end of that magical summer, they returned to Bath, England, hoping to keep Claire and Byron’s pregnancy a secret from London society. There, Mary’s life turned into a roller coaster again. Her half sister, Fanny, committed suicide. Then Shelley’s wife drowned herself. The end of Shelley’s first marriage, however, meant that he and Mary could finally marry. Mary got pregnant again and gave birth to their daughter, Clara. Now a respectable couple in the eyes of society, Mary and Shelley’s families resumed talking to them. The shunning was over.
In 1817, Mary finished her manuscript and submitted it to publishers. She didn’t put her name on it because she was worried about the public reaction to its controversial themes and ideas. The first three publishers rejected it, but eventually, a publisher specializing in books about ghosts and the occult said yes. Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818 to mostly bad reviews. The Quarterly Review described it as “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity.”8 In spite of the bad reviews, the book was quite popular and sold well. Most important to Mary, her father loved it.
After Frankenstein, Mary’s personal life got even rockier. Within a single year, her two children died in her arms at ages one and three (she and Shelley had one more son who survived into adulthood). Then Shelley died when his boat sank off the coast of Italy. Mary was heartbroken and depressed. She never remarried and had no more children. She was sickly for the rest of her life and died of a brain tumor at age fifty-three.
But what saved Mary from utter despair was her work. Through each catastrophe, Mary did what made her happy: she wrote. She wrote five more novels, several travel books, and dozens of biographies, short stories, and articles.
As you know, the creature from Frankenstein became one of the most well-known monsters ever. Mary’s book has never been out of print, is translated into dozens of languages, has sold millions of copies, and is one of the most famous stories of all time!9 It is much more famous than anything ever written by her husband or her other, more famous friends. Frankenstein has been adapted into countless plays, movies, TV shows, and even cartoons. It is considered by many to be the first science-fiction novel ever, as well as the origin of the “mad scientist” character. In fact, Frankenstein basically invented the entire horror genre.10 And all from the imagination of a freethinking eighteen-year-old!
At a time when most women couldn’t follow their passions, Mary Shelley followed hers, no matter the consequence. She wrote until the day she died and made a living at it. And she lived the life she wanted—relatively free from the social rules of her time, from the constrictions forced on women. It was a life her mother would have been proud of.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I will rock the world by becoming a nurse, helping those around me by saving lives and bringing new lives into the world.
TIERRIKA HUTTON 
AGE 18