Women's History Month

 

She began life by ending someone else's.

Not by choice — she was eleven days old. But Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin came into the world on August 30, 1797, and her mother — the great feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who had recently written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — never recovered from the birth.

The baby who would one day create the most enduring monster in literary history began her life in grief before she was old enough to know what grief was.

She grew up in her legendary mother's shadow, resented by a stepmother who couldn't bear looking at a girl who reminded everyone of the woman she'd replaced. Mary taught herself by candlelight, reading her mother's radical books in secret, visiting her grave to feel close to the woman she would never meet.

It was at that gravestone — her mother's — where she first met the man who would change everything.

In 1814, sixteen-year-old Mary encountered Percy Bysshe Shelley — a poet of blazing talent, magnetic presence, and one significant complication: he was married.

They fell in love anyway.

The scandal was swift and total. Percy left his wife. Mary's father — the celebrated progressive philosopher who had spent his career arguing for human freedom — disowned his own daughter for the disgrace. Society branded her a homewrecker and a fallen woman.

Mary and Percy left England together and never looked back.

But the losses followed them.

In February 1815, their first child — a premature baby girl — lived only days. Mary held her. Named her. Lost her. Wrote in her journal: "Dreamt that my little baby came to life again — that it had only been cold."

That sentence alone contains more human pain than most novels.

Summer 1816. Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The sky over Europe had turned strange and dark.

The previous year, the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia had sent ash across the atmosphere, cooling temperatures worldwide. That summer became known as the Year Without a Summer — crops failed, skies darkened at noon, and rain fell for weeks without stopping.

Trapped inside the Villa Diodati with Percy, her stepsister Claire, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori, eighteen-year-old Mary listened to ghost stories read aloud by candlelight.

Then Byron issued his now-famous challenge: "We will each write a ghost story."

The others started. Most gave up.

Mary thought.

She had lost her mother before she could speak. She had buried a child. She had been abandoned by her father, condemned by society, and loved a man the world refused to accept. She understood, in her bones, what it meant to be brought into existence and then cast aside by the very person who created you.

What could be more terrifying, she thought, than a being made by someone who then fled from what they had made?

One night, she had a waking vision: "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." She saw it open its eyes. She saw the creator's horror at what he had done.

She picked up her pen.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus had begun.

But even as she wrote it, reality delivered its darkest chapter yet.

In December 1816, Percy's abandoned wife Harriet — alone, despairing, pregnant — drowned herself in the Serpentine in London.

The news reached Mary and Percy like a stone through glass.

They married weeks later — not in celebration, but in grief and obligation, the shadow of Harriet's death falling across everything.

Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818. It was an immediate sensation — terrifying, philosophical, unlike anything the reading public had encountered. Many assumed Percy had written it. The idea that an eighteen-year-old woman had invented something this intellectually formidable seemed impossible to them.

Mary said nothing and kept writing.

In Italy that same year, her daughter Clara died at one year old.

The following year, her son William died at three.

She had carried four children. She had buried three of them before her twenty-fourth birthday.

"I feel that I am not fit for anything," she wrote, "and therefore not fit to live."

Yet she lived. She kept writing. Because the writing was the only door that led anywhere but darkness.

Then came the worst morning of her life.

July 8, 1822. Percy went sailing on the Gulf of Spezia.

A storm came without warning.

His boat went down.

Ten days later, his body washed ashore. He was twenty-nine years old.

Mary was twenty-four. A widow. With one surviving son, no income, a society that still condemned her, and a father-in-law who offered financial support only if she surrendered her child.

She refused.

Instead, she did what no one expected of a woman in her position.

She worked.

She wrote novels, travel essays, short stories, biographical sketches. She edited and published Percy's complete poetry, fighting for decades to ensure his legacy survived — even as critics refused to believe she had written anything of value herself.

Her 1826 novel The Last Man — imagining a plague that destroys all of humanity — was decades ahead of its time, one of the earliest works of science fiction ever written. Critics dismissed it. History has since recognized it as visionary.

She wrote her way out of poverty and grief. She wrote her way into immortality. She wrote because it was the one thing the world could not take from her.

February 1, 1851. Mary Shelley died from a brain tumor. She was fifty-three years old.

When those who loved her opened her writing desk afterward, they found something that made them catch their breath.

Wrapped carefully in silk — preserved for twenty-nine years since the day his body was pulled from the shore — was Percy's heart. It had survived the flames of the beach pyre that claimed the rest of him. Tucked beside it were the final pages of his last poem.

She had carried it with her for nearly three decades.

Through poverty and prejudice and grief and the long labor of her career — she had carried it.

Frankenstein has never gone out of print since 1818.

It has been adapted into more than a hundred films. The story of a creature abandoned by its creator — desperate for love, condemned by its own existence — has never stopped resonating, because it has never stopped being true about the human condition.

Mary Shelley understood abandonment with a completeness very few writers ever have.

She understood what it felt like to be created and left behind. To love and lose. To be brilliant and dismissed. To carry grief so heavy it should have ended her — and to transform it, year after year, into something that outlives everything.

The monster she created was not born from imagination alone.

It was born from her life.

And every time someone reads about Frankenstein's creature crying out for a love it was never given — standing in the dark, asking why it was made only to be cast aside —

they are reading Mary Shelley's own question.

She never fully received the answer.

But she gave the rest of us the words to keep asking it.

And for that, she will never die.