Mary Shelley: 55 Facts & Trivia About the Feminist Icon & Gothic Horror Queen
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is a gothic icon and groundbreaking feminist — as well as a puzzling enigma. The author of Frankenstein — one of the most well-known classic horror novels of all-time and iconic images in popular culture — portrayed bleak scenes in her literature and lived a life filled with mystery, tragedy, whirlwind romantic liaisons, and fierce rebellions — punctuated by a pretty prolific writing career. Everyone knows Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as the famous writer of Frankenstein but there is a whole lot more to her life than merely writing one of the most influential novels in literary history.
Here are 55 facts that you probably didn’t know about this literary feminist icon and ultimate first Queen of Horror:
Mary Shelley: Early Life, Family & Education
1. Mary Shelley was named after her mother
The writer we know as Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797 in London, England. Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, she was named after her mother, early feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft.
2. Mary Wollstonecraft died when Mary Shelley was only 10 days old
Sadly, Mary’s mother died from a postpartum hemorrhage not very long after giving birth to Mary. Despite not knowing her own mother, Shelley was still very much influenced by her mother’s writings and ideas and continuously visited her gravestone throughout her life.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft was an early women’s rights activist
Not only was Shelley’s mother also a writer, she was also a very early feminist icon who was a major advocate for women’s rights — which is particularly impressive considering this was over 200 years ago. In 1792, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing for women to have the same rights to power, education, and influence in society as men do. More than two hundred years later, the book still resonates as one of the earliest examples of feminist philosophy and remains widely-read — and you can purchase it right now! Spoiler alert: She does not speak well of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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4. Mary Shelley’s father was a writer and a philosopher
Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin was born into a family of Calvinists where his father was a Nonconformist minister. William Godwin was expected to become a minister himself and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Eventually, though, he had a change of heart and began a writing career, where he advocated for enlightenment views. In 1793, he wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which established him as a supporter of philosophical anarchism and even made him something of a literary star. The book is considered the “founding text” on the topic, and you can still buy it today.
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5. William Godwin wrote fiction as well.
One of William Godwin’s works was Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. It built on An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by fictionalizing its concepts into a story about how The Man tries to bring us down and it was very popular in its day.
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6. Mary Shelley’s father married twice — despite writing against marriage
There’s a part in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that briefly touched on the subject of marriage — wherein William Godwin declared his opposition to it. Ironically, William Godwin married twice; first to Shelley’s mother in 1797 and then again to Mary Jane Godwin in 1801.
7. Shelley’s parents were a real-life Enemies to Lovers trope
Mary’s mother met William Godwin at a dinner in the honor of Thomas Paine, the famous Common Sense author and American revolutionary. Godwin was bothered by the fact he was seated near Wollstonecraft and not near Paine. Godwin and Wollstonecraft got into a fierce debate and argument, leaving the dinner irritated by each other. They didn’t get together until five years later when Wollstonecraft wanted to lend Godwin a book.
8. Mary Wollstonecraft had a child before meeting her husband
Shelley’s mother had been with an American diplomat named Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had Frances Imlay (who was referred to as Fanny). After Mary Wollstonecraft died, William Godwin adopted Fanny and raised her along with Mary.
9. Shelley’s father married Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801
Mary Jane came with two children of her own: Jane (also known as Claire) and Charles Clairmont. Later on, Mary Jane and Godwin had a son together, William Godwin Jr.
10. Mary Jane Godwin was the only female publisher of substance in the London literary world of the early 1800s
In 1805, Mary Jane and William Godwin opened M.J. Godwin & Co., and publisher and bookseller. While it was a shared project, the title clearly indicated that it was Mary Jane’s company to run. This house hosted many famous titles, including Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. While it had some initial success, the bookshop was eventually lost to bankruptcy.
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11. Mary Shelley never received a proper education…
Some believe that this was due to Mary Jane’s neglect and jealousy of Shelley’s dead mother (who Godwin’s friends apparently all preferred to Mary Jane). Some also believe that Mary Jane sent her daughter Claire to get an education, while insisted that Shelley did not.
12. …but Mary Shelley managed to learn a lot anyway
She read several of her mother’s books and borrowed books from William Godwin’s extensive library, soaking in the intellectual environment that her father fostered in their home. She may have learned to write her name by tracing the letters on her mother’s tombstone. Nevertheless, she liked writing and developed a passion for storytelling.
13. Growing up, Mary Shelley’s house was always buzzing with interesting visitors
The array of literary characters that came and went include the famous poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the one and only William Wordsworth.
Mary Shelley: Her Life & Times
14. Mary Shelley fell in love with her father’s apprentice
When Mary Shelley was only 16, she met her future husband Percy Shelley and they began to meet in secret. Percy was 21 at the time and working as an apprentice to her father William Godwin. Percy came from a family of aristocrats and was heavily influenced by Godwin’s radicalistic writings. At some point, Percy Shelley agreed to help William Godwin with his debt, so the two had a complicated friendship that fell through when Shelley declared that he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) pay Godwin’s debt. This probably led to enough ill will for William Godwin to disapprove of his daughter’s relationship to Percy Shelley.
15. Percy Shelley was married at the time to Harriet Westbrook
Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley had a whirlwind romance when they were teenagers and married in Scotland. However, Percy was famous for his countless affairs and abandoned Harriet Westbrook — a classmate of Shelley’s sisters — while she was pregnant.
16. Mary Shelley shared her favorite spot with Percy
You guessed it — Mary Shelley’s mother’s gravestone. Mary and Percy Shelley frequently met at Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave at St Pancras Old Church (which has a website!), and it’s even believed that Mary might have lost her virginity to him on her mother’s grave. Goth af, right?
17. Mary and Percy Shelley eloped and ran away together to Paris
On July 28 1814, Mary and Percy eloped in secret and ran away together to the City of Love, doing what many romantic couples merely dream of doing. However, the rest of France they saw en route to Switzerland wasn’t so romantic; it had been freshly torn apart from the War of the Sixth Coalition that was part of the Napoleonic Wars. Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont accompanied them.
18. The couple returned to England pregnant and broke
Mary and Percy Shelley returned to England in late 1814, pregnant and penniless. Mary’s father William Godwin actually ended up disowning her. The couple went into hiding to dodge his first wife and former debts. It did not help that Percy Shelley was probably having an affair with Claire Clairmont.
19. Mary Shelley had four children but only one of them got to grow up
Mary Shelley’s first child Clara was born premature in 1815 and only lived for eight days. Her second was William (1816) and her third was Clara (1817), both of whom fell ill and died in Rome. William was nine at the time and Clara was a newborn. When Percy Florence was born in 1819, Mary was anxious that his fate would be that of his siblings. However, Percy made it into adulthood and married happily, taking care of his mother in Mary Shelley’s elderly years. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley mourned her lost children throughout the rest of her life.
20. Percy saved Mary from a miscarriage
In 1822 when the couple was living in Italy, Mary Shelley was suffering from a miscarriage. Percy made her sit in an ice bath to stop the bleeding, which a doctor later said ended up saving Mary Shelley’s life.
21. Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine Lake…
For a while, Harriet stayed in a London boarding house under the name Harriet Smith, perhaps because she had gotten pregnant from a short-lived lover out of wedlock. In 1816, Harriet Shelley walked to Hyde Park, London and threw herself in the Serpentine Lake.
22. …but some believe that it was a murder
Some believe that William Godwin might have killed Harriet, or arranged to have her killed because she was preventing Shelley from marrying his daughter. One glaring piece of evidence appears to corroborate it: Godwin records Harriet’s death in his journal on November 9th, but no one discovered she was dead until her body was recovered some weeks later. Even if he updated the entry later, as one could suspect to be the case, he couldn’t have known that was the day she died — simply that it was when she was last seen alive.
23. Claire Clairmont had an affair with the famous Lord Byron
In addition to the speculation that Claire Clairmont was involved with Percy Shelley, Mary’s step-sister also had a short affair with the Lord Byron, who was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” according to Lady Caroline Lamb. Claire, Mary, and Percy traveled to Geneva rather than Italy in 1816 because Claire was pregnant and wanted to make the relationship more permanent. Clairmont would later say that her relationship with Byron had given her only a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.
24. Claire’s attempt to create a relationship with Lord Byron in Switzerland failed
At the end of the summer, the group left Lord Byron in Switzerland and returned home. Clairmont moved to Bath and gave birth to a girl named Alba in January 1817, whose name was later changed to Allegra. All through the pregnancy, Clairmont had written numerous letters to Byron, begging for his attention and commitment to help care for her and the child. She even threatened suicide. Lord Byron, who had grown to despise her at this point, simply ignored the letters.
25. Lord Byron eventually took Allegra in, to an extent
When Claire and the Shelleys traveled to Italy in the spring of 1818, Lord Byron took Allegra under his care…only to send her to a convent. Claire was only given a few visits to her daughter, and was obviously against her placement away from a parent’s care. Claire blamed Lord Byron for Allegra’s death from a fever in 1822 when she was five years old — and she never stopped carrying a grudge against him after that.
26. There might have been something going on between Claire Clairmont and Percy Shelley
As alluded to before in this post, it’s commonly thought that Claire Clairmont may have had relations with Percy Shelley, even though no firm evidence was ever discovered. Their buddy Thomas Jefferson Hogg even once made a joke about “Shelley and his two wives,” Mary and Claire, which Clairmont jotted down in her notebook.
27. Mary Shelley was blackmailed with private letters
Gatteschi, an Italian Mary Shelley once befriended, tried to blackmail her with their personal and private letters, threatening to make them public. A.A. Knox, who was a friend of the Shelleys, was able to take the letters away from him with the help of the Paris police. Even now, nobody knows for sure what was written between them.
28. In 1827, Mary Shelley helped two female friends to escape to France disguised as a married couple
Mary Diana Dods was the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish lord who became a writer under the pen name of David Lyndsay. She was a friend of Mary Shelley. Dods began dressing in traditionally masculine clothes and was called Walter Sholto Douglas. LGBTQ+ ally Mary Shelley obtained fake passports for him and his lover, the gorgeous – but unmarried – mother Isabella Robinson under their new identities. The pair was able to travel and eventually settle down as a married couple.
29. Mary and Percy Shelley were only married for six years when he died
On July 8, 1822, Percy Shelley was sailing with his friend Edward Williams when they became lost at sea. A sudden storm attacked their boat and both of them drowned. Percy Shelley’s body didn’t wash ashore for another 10 days, and he was partly identified by the copy of John Keats’s Lamia he was carrying. At 29 years old, Percy Shelley was gone.
30. Percy Shelley’s heart was indestructible
Well, not quite, but Percy Shelley’s heart did survive a cremation. This is pretty common for bones but certainly not common for the heart. Percy Shelley’s friend Leigh Hunt was present for the cremation and snatched it for himself, though the heart eventually found its way back to Mary Shelley. It’s possible that the heart was already calcified due to a bout with tuberculosis Percy Shelley once had, but why let the truth get in the way of a great story?
31. Mary Shelley kept her husband’s heart
Mary Shelley — like the absolute total goth queen she is — carried Percy Shelley’s heart in a silken shroud with her at all times until her death in 1852. Mary Shelley’s son Percy Florence opened Mary’s box-desk. They discovered one of Shelley’s final poems, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats within. When they unwrapped the paper, they discovered that it contained Percy’s heart.
Click to buy the book of poems that held Percy Shelley’s heart!
What books did Mary Shelley write? Overview of Literary Career
32. Frankenstein was written at the behest of Lord Byron
The summer they spent in Lake Geneva in Switzerland was named “the year without summer,” as an eruption in Indonesia had caused a change of weather with heavy rain. While everyone was stuck inside, Lord Byron offered a competition to determine who could create the finest ghost story: Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, or the surgeon John Polidori. The result was not just Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but also John Polidori’s The Vampyre. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley never finished theirs.
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33. Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein
And Mary Shelley was only 21 years old when Frankenstein was published. Mary Shelley wrote: “I busied myself to think of a story. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.”
34. Frankenstein was inspired by a night Mary had
During their stay in Geneva, Mary Shelley had a nightmare, which was her muse to write Frankenstein. She wrote of this dream in her author’s introduction that she dreamed of what would become Frankenstein’s monster, “He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
35. Frankenstein is often considered (very) early science fiction
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Frankenstein is one of the earliest examples of science fiction in the history of storytelling. Scholars over the last century history have regarded Mary Shelley to be the founder of science fiction — to say nothing of her influence on Gothic fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is also regarded as the best known novel of the Romantic era.
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36. Frankenstein was originally published anonymously
Mary Shelley did not add her name to Frankenstein when it was initially published in 1818, and the novel was thought to have been written anonymously. In fact, many readers suspected that Percy Shelley created Frankenstein since he wrote the story’s preface. Mary’s name was not added to the book until 1823, five years later.
37. The public loved Frankenstein but the critics did not
Frankenstein now considered an indisputable literary classic in multiple genres but it wasn’t a raging success when it was first published in 1818. After the novel began to spread around the country, reviewers who read it were astounded by the horrific details and disturbing storyline. After it was published, The Quarterly labeled the work as “a tissue of horrifying and disgusting absurdity.” Some much more conservative folks argued that the book contained satanic concepts and atheist-brainwash.
38. Mary Shelley wrote the semi-biographical Matilda
Mary Shelley wrote her second novel Matilda — which was originally titled The Fields of Fancy — between 1819 and 1820. The novel is pretty suggestive, if not blatantly autobiographical, of Shelley’s own life, featuring characters like herself, her husband Percy Shelley, and her father William Godwin.
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39. Writing Matilda was therapeutic for Mary Shelley
The months she spent writing Matilda occurred at an especially painful time in her life since she had lost two of her children within that year. Mary acknowledged that after her husband’s death writing, “Before when I wrote Matilda, miserable as I was, the inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily – but now I have no respite.”
40. Mary’s father refused to publish Matilda
Mary Shelley submitted the complete version of Mathilda to her father to publish. Despite his admiration for parts of the novella, Godwin considered the incest topic “disgusting and revolting” and even refused to return the manuscript. Mary continued to ask for it but seemed to have lost interest in the topic when her husband passed away, maybe due to her grief or the necessity to produce fresh content to support herself and her small son.
41. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is one of the first dystopian fiction novels
Released in 1826, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man portrays the narrative of a future planet in which disease has wiped off the human population. Interestingly, novel’s characters seem to closely resemble the famous members of the Shelley/Byron circle, including her step-sister, Claire.
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42. The Last Man was Mary Shelley’s attempt to bypass her father-in-law’s restrictions
Mary Shelley’s father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, forbade her from writing a biography of her husband. So she memorialized him in The Last Man instead.
43. It was quite a habit of Mary Shelley to tangle real people into her characters
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck was published in 1830. Perkin Warbeck was infused with characteristics of her late husband, depicting him affectionately as “an angelic essence, incapable of wound,” who is brought into the political arena by his sensibility. She appears to have associated with Richard’s wife, Lady Katherine Gordon, who survives her husband’s murder by negotiating with his political opponents.
44. Lodore and Falkner were Mary Shelley’s feminism-centered writings
Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) were novels presented a broad discussion on the reasons behind woman’s inferior position to men in society. Through them, Mary Shelley expresses her condemnation of nineteenth-century women’s established gender norms.
45. Mary Shelley was the first woman to contribute to Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia
The volumes of Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia were cloth-bound collected works covering ideas for a post-French Revolution world. Priced at six shillings each, they were made to be an affordable source of authoritative knowledge for middle-class readers interested in self-improvement literature. Mary Shelley’s contribution to this project is especially important because she is the only woman among the 38 recognized collaborators.
46. Mary Shelley wrote of her European trips in Rambles in Germany and Italy
Mary Shelley’s Italian companion Gatteschi (the same jerk that tried to blackmail her), helped her write Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 before their relationship went sour. Basically travel diaries of her trips with her son Percy Florence Shelley, this book is Mary Shelley’s last published work
47. Ironically, Mary published Rambles in Germany and Italy so she could help Gatteschi
Mary herself was dissatisfied with her writing in this book, and she only published it to help her friend financially. Mary often described this as “her poor book.”
48. But there was something special about Rambles in Germany and Italy
As a travel book, Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy narrative stands out for its delivery from a political perspective, writing about the Italian politics of the time. In doing so, Mary Shelley defied the early 19th-century norm that women should not comment on politics — just like her mother Mary Wollstonecraft did. Rambles in Germany and Italy was reprinted in the 1970s when interest in Mary Shelley’s body of work came along with a new wave of feminist literary criticism.
Death & Legacy of Mary Shelley
49. For years, Mary Shelley fought the symptoms of an undiagnosed brain tumor….
Modern medicine might have saved Mary Shelley a lot of trouble, but it was a different time. Starting around 1939, Mary Shelley suffered seemingly random bouts of paralysis in certain parts of her body that were severe enough to prevent her from writing sometimes. The paralysis was also accompanied by headaches. In 1843, Mary Shelley complained of feeling a pressure on her brain in when Claire Clairmont wrote to her: “I hope you are well, leave off your stays, eat no potatoes, take ginger and you will be well.”
50. ….which she eventually died of
Mary Shelley died at the age of 53 on February 1, 1851, in London, England of a suspected brain tumor. Mary Shelley was put to rest alongside the cremated ashes of her late husband Percy Shelley’s heart at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth.
51. Mary Shelley’s parents’ remnants would eventually be transferred to her
Following her death, her son Percy and daughter-in-law Jane had Mary Shelley’s parents exhumed from London’s St. Pancras Graveyard (which had fallen into disuse over time) and reburied beside Mary at the family’s cemetery in St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth.
52. MaryShelley’s life has been made into a movie
The 2017 film Mary Shelley directed by controversial female Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour features Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley and Douglas Booth as Percy Shelley. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017. It did not do very well at the box office and the reviews weren’t very favorable but that shouldn’t stop you from watching it yourself.
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53. Modern feminists find inspiration in Mary Shelley’s life
Mary Shelley and her writings and life have served as a great source of inspiration for modern feminists. In an era when women were valued for their dowries and ability to reproduce, Mary Shelley stood apart from other women. Mary Shelley managed to follow her passion and support herself financially through writing while also defying tradition and what was expected of women. In fact, Mary Shelley was a feminist before the word even existed.
54. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein opened new doors to Gothic Literature
Frankenstein is a Gothic novel in the sense that it tells the narrative of Victor Frankenstein’s fatal monster through mystery, secrecy, and frightening psychology with commentary on human nature. However, Mary Shelley also expanded the genre by bringing the supernatural into the realm of science and philosophical problems throughout the plot. Between science fiction, horror, and Gothic, Mary Shelley created and influenced multiple genres with Frankenstein.
55. England’s first family of writers have been archived
The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides digital format of handwritten manuscripts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The culmination of a collaboration between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, with help from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, collects the family’s handwritten works in one place. Thanks to the libraries and organizations in the partnership, more than 90% of all of the family’s known relevant manuscripts are present in this archives.
Final Thoughts About Mary Shelley
That pretty much sums up the mysterious and tragic life of feminist icon and gothic horror queen Mary Shelley. While she continues to be immortalized as a symbol gothic horror, Shelley’s real-life story is one filled with tragic loss, eye-opening voyages, fatal mistakes, and devotion to writing. As the years and decades and centuries pass, our appreciation only grows of Frankenstein and its creator. The story of Mary Shelley and her life is a unique tale on its own.
Are some of the words in this blog post to hard for you? Then you should check out our guide What Kind of Dictionary Should I Buy? And/or better yet, our guide to buying the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary!
Looking for more content about books and literature? Check out our series of fun facts about literature superstars, including Bram Stoker, Philip K. Dick, and Oscar Wilde.
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