History of Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born into a rich literary heritage. William Godwin, her father, was a political theorist, novelist, and publisher. Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, was a writer and early feminist thinker

Mary's mother passes away due to puerperal fever ten days after her daughter's birth

Percy Bysshe Shelly (poet) was one of the people in her father's intellectual circle. The circle also included of William Hazlitt(critic), Charles Lamb (essayist), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet).Mary was 15

Percy is married, the they still travel together

Child died 12 days later

Possible inspiration for Frankenstein: "Dream that my little baby came to life again – that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived.”

William, the son of Mary and Percy, is born

The couple visited the Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. When they visited, it was full of stormy weather forcing them indoors. Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories. One night, Byron challenged his guests to write a scary story themselves. Frankenstein was created

The couple married just weeks after Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned.

Mary gave birth to another daughter, Clara, but she only lived a year