A short life of the author
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797–1851) was born on 30 August 1797 in London, the daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, author of Political Justice. Her mother died of puerperal fever eleven days after Mary’s birth — a loss that haunted Shelley throughout her life and permeates the themes of birth, death, and unnatural creation in Frankenstein.
Life and Career
Mary grew up in Godwin’s intellectually stimulating but emotionally austere household, surrounded by some of the leading thinkers of the age: Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Aaron Burr were visitors. She was educated at home, largely self-taught, and read voraciously. In 1814, at sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a married man, a poet, and a devotee of her father’s philosophy — a scandal that estranged her from Godwin for years.
The summer of 1816 was the decisive event. Mary and Percy, along with Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s stepsister), gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Confined indoors by incessant rain, Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story. Mary, after several days of anxious inability to begin, had a waking vision — “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” — and began Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
She completed the novel the following year and published it anonymously in 1818. Percy wrote the preface, and many readers assumed he was the author — an assumption that dogged Mary’s reputation for decades. The novel was a critical success, and its central image — the scientist who creates a living being and is destroyed by his own creation — became one of the defining myths of modernity.
Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822. Mary was twenty-four, with a young son, no money, and a hostile father-in-law (Sir Timothy Shelley) who provided a meagre allowance on the condition that she not publish Percy’s biography. She spent the next three decades in London, supporting herself and her son through writing: novels (The Last Man, 1826; Lodore, 1835; Falkner, 1837), short stories, biographical essays for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and the editing and annotation of Percy’s literary remains.
She died on 1 February 1851, probably of a brain tumour.
Major Works and Themes
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is one of the few novels that has genuinely entered the collective consciousness. Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a living being from dead matter, his abandonment of his creature, and the creature’s revenge is simultaneously a Gothic thriller, a Promethean myth about the limits of human knowledge, a meditation on parental responsibility, and a prophetic warning about the consequences of technology divorced from moral reflection.
The novel’s power lies in its ambiguity: Frankenstein is both hero and villain, the creature both monster and victim. The creature’s eloquent account of his awakening, his rejected desire for love, and his descent into murderous rage is one of the most moving narratives of exclusion and alienation in literature.
The Last Man (1826) is Shelley’s other major work: a dystopian novel set in the late twenty-first century in which a plague wipes out the human race, leaving a single survivor. It was poorly received but is now recognised as a pioneering work of science fiction and apocalyptic literature.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Frankenstein was anonymous on its first appearance and was attributed by many to Percy Shelley. When Mary was revealed as the author, she was sometimes patronised as a one-book wonder who owed her success to her husband and her famous parents. This dismissive view has been thoroughly overturned by feminist and literary scholarship since the 1970s. Mary Shelley is now recognised as a major Romantic writer in her own right, the creator of one of the foundational myths of modern culture, and a pioneer of science fiction.
The cultural afterlife of Frankenstein is unmatched: the novel has been adapted into hundreds of films, plays, and other media, and the figure of the creature — often erroneously called “Frankenstein” — is one of the most recognizable icons in world culture.
Key Works
- Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- Valperga (1823)
- The Last Man (1826)
- Lodore (1835)
- Falkner (1837)
Collecting Shelley
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, London, three volumes) is one of the most important and valuable first editions in all of English literature. The first edition was published anonymously in an edition of 500 copies. Copies in the original boards are of extraordinary rarity; complete three-volume sets have sold for $500,000–$1,200,000 at auction — placing Frankenstein among the most valuable novels of the nineteenth century. Even individual volumes from the first edition command significant prices.
The revised second edition (1823, G. and W.B. Whittaker, two volumes), which bore Mary Shelley’s name for the first time, is also collected: $10,000–$40,000 for fine copies.
The 1831 Colburn and Bentley edition, with a new introduction by Shelley and significant textual revisions, is the third edition and the basis for most modern reprints. First editions bring $2,000–$10,000.
The Last Man (1826, Henry Colburn, three volumes) is uncommon and collected at $3,000–$15,000.
Mary Shelley autograph material is rare. Her letters — many of them published in scholarly editions — are of significant literary and biographical value. Items that surface at auction command prices of $5,000–$20,000 or more. The major Shelley archives are at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library.