Harriet Shelley's suicide
in December 1816 allowed Mary and Percy to marry. They
had four children together, but only one, Percy Florence,
survived his parents. The loss of their first child
affected Mary profoundly, and seems to have shaped the
themes of her first novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus (1818). Mary Shelley conceived this story in
1816, while staying on Lake Geneva as the guest of Byron.
According to her introduction to the novel, their host
challenged his guests to write a ghost story, and
Frankenstein was the product of its author's unusually
vivid nightmare. In combining Gothic terrors with extreme
physical realism and a basis in the sciences of biology
and electricity, Shelley founded the genre of science
fiction. The novel is the story of Victor Frankenstein, a
medical student who constructs a living being from the
remains of dissecting-room corpses. Victor's experiments
dramatize the morality of the act of creation itself. He
explains: "I collected bones from charnel- houses;
and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous
secrets of the human frame." Horrified by the result
of his project, Frankenstein abandons the Creature, who
wanders the countryside, tormented by his total isolation
from humanity. The Creature persuades his creator to
construct a second, female being, but Victor dismembers
this before it can be brought to life. In revenge, the
Creature murders Frankenstein's bride. A chase across the
world then ensues, Victor determining "to pursue the
dæmon who caused this misery until he or I shall perish
in mortal conflict". The Creature, despite his
monstrosity, is an intensely tragic figure, and Shelley
effects an uncanny merging of its personality with that
of Victor, who considers it "my own vampire, my own
spirit let loose from the grave". A critical and
popular success, the book was dedicated to William
Godwin.
After her husband's death in 1822, Shelley returned to
England, where she settled with her son. She was granted
a small allowance by her father-in-law, Sir Timothy
Shelley, but this was temporarily withdrawn when she
published Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems (1824).
She spent much time editing and annotating her late
husband's work, but, owing to Sir Timothy's opposition,
she was unable to publish the Poetical Works until 1839.
Shelley published five other novels. Valperga (1823) is a
romance of 14th-century Italy. The Last Man (1826) is an
apocalyptic fantasy in which humanity is destroyed by
plague. Set in a republican Britain of the year 2073, it
traces the effects of global catastrophe on a small group
of characters and their wider environment. The final
section of the book sees its narrator, Lionel Verney,
living in the ruins of a decimated Rome. The Fortunes of
Perkin Warbeck (1830) is a historical drama much
influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Lodore
(1835) and Falkner (1837) are domestic stories with
strongly autobiographical elements. Another novel,
Mathilda (1819), which tells the story of an incestuous
relationship between a father and daughter, remained
unpublished until 1959.
Financing her son's private education, Mary Shelley
continued to write essays and short fiction for
periodicals such as the Keepsake. Between 1835 and 1838
she produced a series of scholarly biographies for the
Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia series. The death of Sir
Timothy Shelley in 1844 brought a new-found security to
her life, but her closing years were troubled by threats
of blackmail from embittered members of the Shelley and
Byron families. |
