Her father William Godwin was left to care for Shelley and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay. Imlay was Wollstonecraft's daughter from an affair she had with a soldier. The family dynamics soon changed with Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801. Clairmont brought her own two children into the union, and she and Godwin later had a son together. Shelley never got along with her stepmother. Her stepmother decided that her stepsister Jane (later Claire) should be sent away to school, but she saw no need to educate Shelley.
These issues -- birth/death, parental rejection, competition for paternal affections -- would permeate Shelley's most famous work.
Met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a prominent Romantic poet.
At age 16, Mary fell in love with the (already-married) Shelley and ran off with him to Europe.
She ran away with him to France and they were married in 1816 after Shelley's wife committed suicide.
Mary was deeply surprised and disappointed when her own father was angered at this elopement. Her father's rejection caused her to feel a greater sense of isolation and dependence on Shelley.
Lost their first child, a girl who lived only a few days.
Quote from a NYT book review of a biography of Mary Shelley:
...Neither did Mary's two daughters. Her son William died of malaria at the age of 3, and her fifth pregnancy miscarried. Only one son, Percy, grew up. It is possible that her stepsister Claire Clairmont was pregnant by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley's husband, and that the child was aborted or miscarried. Births and deaths coexisted violently in Mary's world. Her mother had twice attempted suicide during her unhappy affair with her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Their child, Mary's half sister Fanny, did commit suicide, perhaps out of love for Percy Bysshe Shelley. His first wife, Harriet, killed herself while pregnant. Byron's friend John Polidori, an admirer of Mary Shelley, committed suicide too (but not, as Seymour thinks, at the age of 21.)
Mary and Shelley fell in love. They eloped to France, with Jane (later Claire) Clairmont in tow, in 1814. The discarded Harriet was pregnant by Shelley. Mary became pregnant too, but the baby died. Shelley also encouraged his women to have sexual relationships with others. He thought he was implementing ideas of free love once advocated by Wollstonecraft and Godwin. (Godwin, more bourgeois than his own principles, was scandalized.) This history haunted Mary Shelley's reputation when she settled in England again after Shelley's death in a sailing accident in Italy. In spite of the success of ''Frankenstein,'' she never had the rewards of celebrity, only a bad name.
Composition of Frankenstein
Stayed near Lake Geneva the year after the volcano (Mt. Tambora, blew up in 1815. 1816 called "the year without a summer"
Contest to tell best horror story.
In 1822 Percy Shelley drowned and Mary remained unmarried and died in London in 1851
She wrote Frankenstein after Byron introduced a challenge to discern whom among the three writers --- Percy, Mary and Byron -- could write the best ghost story
How appropriate is it that the original idea for Frankenstein appeared to Shelley in a nightmare?
Frankenstein deals with loss, which Mary Shelley knew a great deal about.
Multiple miscarriages/early deaths of children -- and Shelley himself, in a boating accident.