Mary Shelley: The Teenager Who Invented Science Fiction and Buried Almost Everyone She Loved
She wrote the first true work of science fiction before she could legally be considered an adult by today's standards — and then spent three decades writing her way through grief that would have silenced most people entirely.
Most writers spend a career building toward one defining book. Mary Shelley wrote hers before she turned twenty, almost as a footnote to a parlor game — and then spent the next three decades proving it was no accident, while burying a husband and three children along the way. The story of how Frankenstein came to exist is well known. The story of the woman who survived everything around it is the more remarkable one.
InheritanceBorn of Two Radicals, Raised by One
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in London, the daughter of two of the most provocative thinkers of the age. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the founding texts of Western feminism — and died eleven days after Mary's birth from an infection following the delivery. Her father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher whose own writing had argued for the abolition of marriage and government as Mary knew them; he was left to raise his daughter largely alone, alongside her older half-sister Fanny Imlay.
Godwin gave Mary an unusually rich, if informal, education for a girl of her era, and encouraged her to absorb his own radical political philosophy. The household was a magnet for the period's most provocative minds — Mary grew up overhearing conversations that would have shaped any child's sense of what ideas were permitted to be dangerous. When she was four, Godwin remarried a neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, and Mary's relationship with her stepmother was, by most accounts, a difficult one for the rest of her childhood.
ScandalElopement, and a Sixteen-Year-Old's Gamble
In 1814, at sixteen, Mary began a relationship with one of her father's political admirers: the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was twenty-one, already married, and expecting a second child with his wife Harriet. That July, Mary fled to France with Shelley, accompanied by her stepsister Claire Clairmont — a decision that cost her her father's speech for more than two years and left the young couple penniless and socially ostracized on their return to England.
The years that followed were defined by financial precarity and personal loss in roughly equal measure. Mary gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Clara, in February 1815; born two months premature, the baby died within weeks. A second child, a son named William, was born in January 1816 and survived — for a time. The couple did not marry until December 1816, after the death by suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, that same winter.
Origin StoryVilla Diodati — the Night That Created Frankenstein
In the summer of 1816, Mary, Percy, their infant son William, and Claire Clairmont traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, where they spent the season near Lord Byron and his physician, John William Polidori, at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. The summer of 1816 was unusually cold and wet across Europe — later remembered as the "Year Without a Summer," a consequence of the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year — and the group found themselves confined indoors for long stretches.
Trapped by the weather, Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story. Mary, then eighteen, struggled for days to find an idea — until a late-night conversation between Byron and Percy about galvanism and the possibility of reanimating dead matter gave her a waking vision: a scientist who creates life, only to recoil in horror from what he has made.
She began writing what would become Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus almost immediately. The novel took shape over the following months and was finished in the spring of 1817 — Mary was not yet twenty years old.
The novel was published anonymously on January 1, 1818, in a print run of just 500 copies by a small London publisher, on the cheapest paper available. Many early readers assumed it had been written by Percy Shelley, in part because the novel was dedicated to her father, William Godwin. Mary did not publicly claim authorship at first — both because of the novel's unsettling subject matter and the period's skepticism toward female authorship of serious literature — but the book's popularity grew quickly; by that summer, a family friend was already telling the Shelleys the novel "seems to be universally read."
The NovelFrankenstein — What It Actually Does
Strip away two centuries of film adaptations and the novel that remains is stranger, sadder, and more philosophically exacting than its pop-culture reputation suggests. Victor Frankenstein, a young and consumingly ambitious scientist, assembles a sentient being from collected body parts — and the moment it opens its eyes, he is overcome with horror and abandons it. The Creature, articulate and initially capable of compassion, is driven to vengeance only after a prolonged experience of rejection, isolation, and cruelty from every human who encounters him.
Unchecked scientific ambition and the responsibility a creator owes to what they create; the formation of identity through isolation and rejection rather than nature; the limits of Romantic faith in the sublime power of nature to heal; and a sustained critique of the very Romantic ideals the novel's setting and imagery otherwise embody.
The book is widely regarded as the first true science fiction novel, and its themes — the ethics of creation, the responsibilities of inventors toward their inventions, and the question of who counts as fully human — have only grown more relevant with each subsequent wave of scientific advance, from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence. The 1931 Boris Karloff film fixed a very different image in popular memory — the lumbering, near-mute monster — but the novel's Creature is something closer to a tragic, self-aware outcast, and Frankenstein himself is the book's true target of judgment.
LossA Decade of Graves — the Children She Lost
What the publication history of Frankenstein tends to obscure is what was happening to its author at the same time. Of Mary Shelley's four children, three did not survive infancy or early childhood — and the losses arrived in a tight, brutal sequence that ran almost exactly parallel to her most productive years as a novelist.
Mary held her husband at least partly responsible for the deaths of Clara Everina and William, believing he had pushed the family to keep traveling rather than pause for adequate medical care — a conviction that drove a deep and lasting rift between them in the period before his own death. It was in the depths of grief over William, in the second half of 1819, that Mary began writing Mathilda.
The Wider ShelfBeyond the Monster — the Rest of the Work
Mary Shelley published six more novels after Frankenstein, along with short stories, biographical essays, and travel writing — a body of work that has only recently begun to receive sustained critical attention independent of her most famous book.
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Mathilda
written 1819–20 A novella written in the aftermath of William's death and not published until 1959. The story centers on a father's confessed incestuous love for his daughter, narrated by the daughter from her deathbed — a reversal of the direction the subject is sometimes assumed to take. Mary's own father, William Godwin, found the manuscript "disgusting and detestable" and withheld it from her for the rest of her life, fearing readers would see himself in it. -
Valperga
1823 A historical novel set amid the wars between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in fourteenth-century Italy, centered on the real historical despot Castruccio Castracani and the fictional Countess Euthanasia, who governs the fortress of Valperga and must choose between her love for Castruccio and her commitment to political liberty. Often read today as a meditation on republicanism and the cost of imperial ambition. -
The Last Man
1826 An early and strikingly bleak work of apocalyptic fiction, set in the late twenty-first century, following a plague that wipes out nearly all of humanity. Written after the deaths of both Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel is widely read as Mary's reckoning with personal loss on a civilizational scale, and as a quiet rebuke of the Romantic political idealism both men had embodied. -
Later novels & nonfiction
1830–1844 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) followed, alongside History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817, co-written with Percy) and her later travel volume Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). She also wrote biographical essays for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia and devoted significant energy to editing and publishing her late husband's poetry and prose.
AftermathWidowed at Twenty-Four, Writing for Thirty Years
On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank in a storm off the coast of Italy, near Viareggio; he was twenty-nine. Mary, twenty-four, was left to raise their only surviving child alone, with no independent income and a father-in-law who refused to deal with her directly for the rest of his life, communicating only through lawyers and threatening to cut off her son's allowance if any biography of Percy were published during his lifetime.
It is a bitter thought that all should be risked on one — yet how much sweeter than to be childless, as I was for five hateful months.
— Mary Shelley, letter to Marianne Hunt, written after the birth of Percy Florence
Mary returned to England in 1823 and spent the rest of her life supporting herself and her son through her writing — novels, essays, biographical sketches, and the painstaking, often legally fraught work of editing and publishing Percy's poetry. She never remarried. Her final years were marked by declining health, beginning around 1839 with headaches and episodes of partial paralysis; she died at her home in London on February 1, 1851, at fifty-three, from what her physician believed was a brain tumor — though modern medical historians have suggested a series of strokes is the more likely cause. She was buried at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, where her son and daughter-in-law later moved the remains of both her parents to rest beside her.
LegacyThe Mother of Science Fiction
For nearly a century and a half, Mary Shelley's literary reputation was almost entirely subordinate to her husband's. Until the 1970s, she was remembered chiefly as the woman who had championed Percy Shelley's poetry after his death and, almost incidentally, as the author of one very famous novel. It took the rise of feminist literary criticism in the late twentieth century to recover the rest of her work — Mathilda, Valperga, The Last Man — as serious, independently ambitious writing rather than footnotes to a more famous marriage.
Frankenstein has aged into one of the most consequential novels in the English language precisely because its central question — what do we owe to the things we create, once we have given them a kind of life — has never stopped being current. Each new wave of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and now artificial intelligence has found in Mary Shelley's eighteen-year-old imagination a vocabulary it still reaches for first.
The woman behind the novel deserves equal billing with the monster. She wrote her masterpiece as a teenager, buried three children and a husband by the age of twenty-five, and kept writing — through poverty, social exile, and grief that she rarely tried to disguise in her fiction — for nearly thirty years afterward. That combination of early genius and sustained endurance is, in its own way, as remarkable as anything she invented on the page.
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