Mary Shelley was born on August 30^th, 1797; her parents were William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two of the most famous and talked-about intellectuals of the time. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792, a piece of writing that had her become famous among the revolutionaries, so much so that it was published even in the Kingdom of Naples. Wollstonecraft had been part of a group of radical dissenters that had formed around the publisher Joseph Johnson and included William Godwin, Tom Paine, William Blake, Heinrich Füssli, and many others who had enthusiastically joined the French Revolution hoping for the advent of a new world, free from wars and social inequalities. At the time, Wollstonecraft had gone to Paris as a journalist to closely follow the revolution. There, during the Reign of Terror, she had had a relationship with Gilbert Imlay, an American, and a child, Fanny, later adopted by William Godwin. She had also travelled to Scandinavia for business and had written several books about women and their lives, including the two novels Mary: A Fiction and Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman. Back in London, following Imlay’s abandonment and the failure of all her ideals, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. Her friend William Godwin (1756-1836) helped her through her severe depression; known for his essay Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and his novel Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin was a philosopher and a writer, well-acquainted with some of the most important writers and scientists of the time, and – like Wollstonecraft – suffering the consequences of the revolution’s failure. He was an anarchist and pacifist as well as a generous teacher; as a radical sympathising with the Jacobins he was accused, but later acquitted, in the 1794 treason trials. His politics damaged his reputation and Godwin had had to struggle to gain a living. Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s marriage, as well as the impeding birth of their child, shone like a beacon of hope for the people in their circle, a sign that things were turning up for the better.

Their daughter Mary, however, was not granted an easy start to her life. On September 10^th, Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever, leaving a distraught Godwin in search for answers: would the baby have the same qualities as her mother? Godwin asked for phrenologist William Nicholson’s opinion who, on September 18^th, carefully measured Mary’s skull to predict a bright future for the little girl.

Mary was convinced to have been the cause of her mother’s death; she took both her parents’ surnames – Wollstonecraft and Godwin – which read more like a burden in post-war England, which had triumphed against France – and wore them like a badge on her chest. All her life, she proudly although humbly loved and studied her parents’ works and, as in a game of mirrors, reflected their subjects and themes. She satisfied Godwin’s – and, later, Shelley’s – expectations of her.

In 1831, in the introduction to the second edition of Frankenstein, she wrote: “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. […] My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame.”^[1]

Mary lived her childhood under the portrait John Opie had painted of her mother, a painting that would never leave Godwin’s study, not even after his second marriage, in 1801, to Mary Jane Clairmont (a widow, mother of Jane – later called Claire – and Charles, who would later have Godwin’s son William). She spent much of her adolescence reading and studying her mother’s work sitting against her tombstone, in the churchyard of Saint Pancras, up until Godwin sent her multiple times to Scotland to distract her, visiting his friend Cap. Robert Baxter and his daughters. Nevertheless, it’s on her mother’s grave that Mary would find love in Sir Percy Shelley, who would whisk her away to a life full of love and passion for writing, poetry, art, and revolution.

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) was a young revolutionary poet who had been expelled from the University of Oxford because of an essay titled The Necessity of Atheism, written with his friend Thomas Hogg. His own family had turned their backs on him after his father disowned him. Shelley suffered from other people’s misfortunes as if they were his own and tried everything he could – whether that was writing or dishing out money – to alleviate their suffering. He had long considered Mary’s parents to be his own moral and intellectual parents. In Mary he found a reflection of himself, of his dreams and ideals… “Shelley the madman”, that’s what his companions called him, had just come back from a trip to Ireland in support of the Catholics, along with his then wife Harriet Westbrook (whom he had saved from the tyranny of her father and a life of reclusion in a boarding school), and he jumped at the occasion to financially help out Godwin who, with the hope of gaining enough to support his big family, had started a publishing house on Skinner Street with many financial setbacks. Shelley barged into their life, soon winning over both Godwin’s heart and that of his daughters; he then asked for Mary’s hand, sixteen at the time, wishing for her to become his life companion. After a year filled with rowdy scenes, pitiful pleas, and suicide threats from Shelley, Percy and Mary eloped on July 28^th, 1814, and left England along with her stepsister Claire, amid public cries of indignation on behalf of Shelley’s first wife, pregnant at the time and already with a young daughter by the man. Percy and Mary wrote together a travel journal as they travelled through Europe titled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. This should have marked the beginning of a fruitful writing cooperation between the two but, in the end, it turned out to be the only work they crafted together, although they kept up a sort of correspondence through their novels and essays. That same year, on November 30^th, Charles Shelley was born, second-born child of Percy and Harriet, followed a few months later, on February 22^nd, 1815, by Percy and Mary’s first daughter, who tragically died just a couple of weeks later on March 6^th still without a name. Mary would always grieve and dream of her. On January 24^th, 1816, William Shelley was born. In May of that same year, Mary, Percy, and Claire (pregnant with Lord Byron’s child) went to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron at his villa near Lake Geneva, Villa Diodati, where he lived with his personal doctor, William Polidori. It was here that Mary devised and started drafting Frankenstein, or The modern Prometheus, while Polidori wrote The Vampyre.

“I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

It’s with these immortal words that Mary talks about her “grim terrors of my waking dream”, the one about a corpse coming back to life (something, as she was well aware, that scientists like Luigi Galvani, Erasmus Darwin, and Giovanni Aldini were trying to achieve) and killing its maker. But these emotions – terror, horror, this colliding of dream and reality – were shared by Mary’s friends too in 1816, the “Year Without a Summer”: Mount Tambora erupted, spreading its ashes in the atmosphere; many left England, where instead of the infinite riches promised by liberal economists, the industrial revolution had only delivered policemen charging men, women, and children during the Luddite riots of 1811 and 1812. They saw dethroned kings and queens gain their power back with the Conservative Order, and named those years “the Age of despair”, as mentioned in Percy Shelley’s poem The Revolt of Islam (1817).

Followed wherever they went by talk of satanism, incest, and atheism (Mary and Percy were not yet married; Percy was rumoured to have a relationship with Claire, too; Lord Byron had fled from London after the scandal of the alleged incestuous relationship with his sister Ada), they became some sort of mediums of their time; it’s from their imaginations and their writings that the two dark creatures still famous today were born: Frankenstein the scientist, undiscernible from his monstruous creature, and the Vampire, an evil belonging to a superior race which requires a bloody tribute – foreshadowing their future, perhaps? But Mary and Percy were not fully able to grasp the consequences of their actions, too deep in their revolutionary dreams. After they got back to England, everything fell apart. On October 9^th, Fanny committed suicide after discovering that she was not Godwin’s daughter and burdened by the scandal of her sister fleeing with Percy. On December 10^th, Harriet’s body was recovered in Hyde Park, drowned in the Serpentine; her suicide allowed Mary and Percy to finally marry and, eventually, reconcile with Godwin. In early 1817, Claire gave birth to Allegra, Lord Byron’s daughter. The man would agree to acknowledge his daughter only after Claire consented not to see her again (On April 20^th, 1820, Allegra passed away at age six, in a convent in Bagnacavallo, in Italy, having seen her mother only rarely).

Mary and Percy took refuge in writing. They spilled their souls on the pages, trough words and images. Mary continued working on Frankenstein throughout 1817, as obsessed with death as ever.

“I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.” (Frankenstein, chapter 5)

She dedicated the book to her father, having it end with flames. Percy had his heroes be burnt alive as well: Laon and Chytna (The Revolt of Islam), a couple of young lovers – brother and sister in the first draft, which was changed due to the publisher fearing a scandal – killed by the same tyrannical power they had wished to dismantle. In her journals, Mary would write later on: “I cannot live as I do… without a metaphor I cannot live” (Journals I, p. 452). The London Court did not recognise Percy’s paternal power over the children Harriet had given him. In September, Mary gave birth to Clara Everina. In 1818, Frankenstein was finally published, but the family suffered another blow: the Court removed Percy’s paternal power over Mary’s children, as well.

In March, Mary, Percy, their children, Claire, and her daughter Allegra left England for good, accepting their fate as pariahs. They would travel for eight consecutive years, with their young children and despite Mary’s numerous pregnancies, hoping for a complete regeneration. Still, their journey through Italy was scarred by many losses and tragedies. As if something was out to persecute them, every pleasant stop was followed by death and desperation. They sought out other exiles like them. First and foremost, Lord Byron, bound to them by something akin to a blood bond, stronger that a simple friendship. But during their journey towards Venice to meet with him, on September 24^th, 1818, Clara died. From Venice, they first moved to Livorno, to visit their friends Maria and John Gisborne, and then to Rome, to pay a visit to John Keats, on the brink of death, and Amalia Curran, who would paint their portrait. After staying in Naples for several weeks – a time clouded by the shadows of a new scandal around the birth of a baby girl, Maria Adelaide, perhaps a daughter of Percy and Claire’s, left in the care of a Neapolitan family – the party went back to Rome, where William died in June 1819. His death saw both Mary and Percy fall into a deep depression, which pushed them almost to suicide. In Rome, Percy wrote The Cenci, a tragedy about Beatrice Cenci and her execution in 1600 for having killed her father, who had raped her. Through this work, Percy stated his disgust towards a society ripe with sexual violence and abuse, validated by patriarchal power and both religious and secular institutions. Three months later, in October 1820, still in a depression so deep that she had stopped speaking, Mary completed Mathilda, a “romantic tale” about the incestuous relationship between a father and daughter, the theme of numerous myths, tragedies, and fables, from Oedipus to Myrrha, which Mary had read about in Ovid and Alfieri (and would have loved to translate as well). Published posthumously only in 1959 (on receiving the manuscript, Godwin had described it as “disgusting”, and had thrown it into a drawer where it would remain for more than a century), the novel takes shape from Mary’s own life – her mother’s death in childbirth, a deep need for love never to be fulfilled, the psychological incest with her father – and brings it to the extreme with Mathilda’s father committing suicide, the protagonist being abandoned by the poet and finally dying by consumption – creating an “extended metaphor” (Journals II, p. 447) of Mary’s life. Not only hers, but of all women. Mathilda is a romantic antiheroine, caged in a prison she can’t and knows not how, or maybe does not dare, to escape from (Davemport-Garret M., 1995), imprisoned by her father’s love (Sapegno, 2018) – “the only being I was doomed to love” (Mathilda, chapter 12) – or her husband’s. She is forced to flee, in shame, covering her sins and considering her pain as her only treasure. The theme of the violent detachment from her mother because of male power comes back in Proserpine – “Dear mother, don’t leave me not.” – a mythological verse drama that Mary wrote soon after.

In November 1819, Percy Florence was born in Florence, Italy, and Mary was again herself. From January 1820 to April 1822, while in the rest of Europe revolutionary uprisings were on the surge and Greece was on the brink of independence, Mary and Percy lived in Pisa; here, they met a large group of fellow Englishmen and women, among whom were Lady Mountcashell – who had been a student of Mary Wollstonecraft –, Jane and Edward Williams, and John Trelawny, who would go on to share a big part of their lives. The kindness and warmth of the people in Pisa and the new, unexpected friendships proved to be a balm to Mary and Percy both. They even started translating Dante in English together. “Pisa is the Paradise of exiles… the retreat of Pariahs…”, Percy wrote to Thomas Medwin. Mary became friends with Greek prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, exiled to Pisa, who – along with Lord Byron – would later do his part in defending the city of Missolonghi from the Ottomans.

Mary finally enjoyed a period of tranquillity and sweetness, allowing her to write the novel that symbolises her revivification. She had been thinking about it since 1817, and five years later Valperga or The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca finally saw the light. The novel is a huge literary fresco about medieval history, also dealing with women’s history – something that had been a long-held writing desire of Wollstonecraft. To Mary, it was more than a novel, it was more akin to a child, her own flesh and blood, and she talked about the writing process in terms of pregnancy and a difficult motherhood:

“[…] It has indeed been a child of mighty slow growth since I first thought of it in our library at Marlow. I then wanted the body in which I might embody my spirit. The materials for this I found at Naples, but I wanted other books. Nor did I begin it till a year afterwards at Pisa […]”

This she wrote to Maria Gisborne on June 30^th, 1821. Valperga is a historical romance in which episodes from Mary’s own life once again give life to the characters, but the narration is fluid, much like authors such as Walter Scott, William Godwin, Matthew Gregory Lewis, or Ann Radcliff – all of whom, however, had established the canon of a male hero supported by female characters. Mary does the opposite: the famous condottiero Castruccio is merely a co-protagonist alongside Euthanasia and Beatrice, the two women who love him but nevertheless defy him, rejecting his warlike ideals. The female protagonists, alongside the two heretic women Wilhelmina and Magfreda (two centuries later, they will be the subject of Luisa Muraro’s non-fiction book Guglielma e Maifreda, Storia di un’eresia femminista del Medio Evo), with their dream of an all-female Trinity that might change the world, unite Christians, Jews, and Muslims, rebuild the Church, and wipe away all wars – including wars of religion –, paint a magnificent picture of power and prophecy; they are the main characters in an alternate history very different from that of the patriarchy, embodied by Castruccio; a defeated, yet invincible, history. All the people in Mary’s life, transfigured, make an appearance in the novel: Wollstonecraft as Beatrice; Mary herself and Percy as Euthanasia; Godwin in the kind and peaceful characters. Still, it came to a point where Mary could no longer continue writing her long tale: she was obsessed with the image of a young, beautiful body sleeping in the muddy caves on the bottom of the ocean, where seaweed grows among its shiny hair and the spirits living in the abyss, the merciful heavens, the seagulls, and thunders weep. She imagined “huge, dark pillars” coming down from above and sweeping away the boat on which Euthanasia was travelling. Her heroine dies in a tragic shipwreck, alongside her dream of peace.“She was never heard of more; even her name perished. […] Earth felt no change when she died; and men forgot her. Yet a lovelier spirit never ceased to breathe, nor was a lovelier form ever destroyed amidst the many it brings forth,” Mary wrote, and in 1824 would use nearly the same words to describe Percy’s death. In Pisa, Percy met new lovers: the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani, who had been caged up in a convent for three years; in his eyes, she was a prisoner and had to be rescued. When Percy went to the convent to give her her freedom, she was no longer there, married off to someone else. Percy suffered much because of this, while Mary laughed at him. She read, amused, the poem Epipsychidion, in which Percy described her as a “cold chaste moon”, his eternal love, that now had to fit alongside his love for Teresa – and for Claire, too. Years later, Mary would recount Percy’s naivete in a humorous tale, The Bride of Modern Italy.

The family left once again, this time heading to San Terenzo di Lerici, departing from Golfo della Spezia which, honouring their memory, would be later called Golfo dei Poeti (the Gulf of Poets). They moved in with the Williams, in a white-washed house near the beach, and there their years-long escape would come to a tragic end. On July 8^th, 1822, Percy, his friend Edward Williams, and a young cabin boy named Charles Vivian died in a shipwreck off the coast of Viareggio. On August 14^th, their bodies were cremated on the beach. Percy’s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, next to little William’s grave. Mary found herself all alone, at twenty-four years old, with her son Percy Florence. Distraught, she stayed in Genoa for a year, with her friends Marianna and Leigh Hunt, as well as Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, and eventually resigned herself to head back to London, where her elopement with Percy was still unforgiven. Here, alone and ostracised – even as Frankenstein was transposed to the stage, and would soon tour throughout Europe and the USA –, she made a living through her writing, her last resource as well as her whole world, full of painful memories. She never stopped dreaming of her beloved Italy (where she managed to return twice, in 1840 and 1842, with her son who had inherited some money from his grandfather, Sir Timothy), just like she never stopped supporting her English friends in exile. She never lost sight of the ideals they had all fought far, from Wollstonecraft to Godwin and Percy. Right before his death, Percy had been working along with Lord Byron and their publisher friend Leigh Hunt, to create a new magazine, The Liberal, which would have campaigned for liberal and revolutionary ideals all around Europe against the Holy Alliance. Lord Byron would also die in 1824 in Greece, where he had gone to fight for the country’s independence from the Turks; Mary attended his crowded funeral service in London, where society had finally decided to honour him in death.

Both Percy and Mary left many difficult works, filled with passion and love for humankind and the universe, as well as many personal journals and correspondence. Percy produced philosophical and literary essays, short poems, tragedies, translations, and impassioned speeches against war and states; in his beautiful lyrical poems, style is never disjointed from his political and social activism, turning instead into a new mean to make his utopian society come to life through words and dreams. Always in conversation with Mary, creating an ever-lasting intellectual and spiritual tension. His Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical tragedy to this day still performed in theatres, is the opposite of Mary’s modern Prometheus, Frankenstein: Percy’s Prometheus gives his life to the sacrifice which will let love free in the universe. Their conversation does not stop with Percy’s passing. In San Terenzio, Percy not only had written some beautiful love poems dedicated to Jane Williams, but also a poem written in terza rima, titled The Tryumph of Life, which actually dealt with a triumph of death. Back in London, Mary wrote the novel The Last Man, where she envisioned an invincible plague sweeping over Earth, killing everyone except Lionel, an androgynous character modelled off herself, who eventually faces all alone the sea and future in a small boat, with only Homer’s and Shakespeare’s work with them. She also wrote a poem dedicated to Percy – The Choice – , two novels – Lodore in 1835 and Faulkner in 1837 –, many short stories, and biographies of famous men from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. In 1839, finally having received her father-in-law’s permission, she published The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, in four volumes; this work is still incredibly important to fully understand Percy Shelley’ s works. It is in these volumes that Mary crafted Percy’s persona, an angel for humanity, who would win over socialists and anarchists, writers and poets, workers and underclassmen all over the world.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died on February 1^st, 1851, in London, in her house on Chester Square. She was buried in St. Peter’s cemetery in Bournmouth, next to Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s graves. Legend has it, she was buried with Percy’s heart, given to her by her friend Trelawny who had saved it from the fire.