[Daughter of William Godwin.] Born, in London, 30 Aug. 1797. Met Shelley, 1814. Eloped to Continent with him, 28 July 1814; returned, Sept. 1814. Married to Shelley, after his wife’s suicide, 30 Dec. 1816. Lived at Marlow, 1817–18. To Italy, on account of Shelley’s health, March 1818; he was drowned there, 8 July 1822. She returned to London, 1823; devoted herself to literature. Travelled on Continent, 1840, 1842–43. Died, in London, 21 Feb. 1851. Buried in Bournemouth Churchyard. Works: “History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, etc.” (with her husband; anon.), 1817; “Frankenstein” (anon.), 1818; “Valperga” (anon.), 1823; “The Last Man” (anon.), 1826; “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck” (anon.), 1830; “Lodore” (anon.), 1835; “Falkner” (anon.), 1837; “Lives of the most Eminent, Literary, and Scientific Men of France” (anon.; 2 vols.), 1838–39; “Rambles in Germany and Italy” (2 vols.), 1844. Posthumous: “The Choice,” ed. by H. B. Forman (priv. ptd.), 1876. She edited: Shelley’s “Posthumous Poems” [1824]; “Poetical Works,” 1839; “Essays, etc.,” 1840. Collected Works: “Tales and Stories,” ed. by R. Garnett, 1891. Life: “Life and Letters,” by F. A. Marshall, 1889.

Personal

  Mrs. Shelley was, I have been told, the intimate friend of my son in the lifetime of his first wife, and to the time of her death, and in no small degree, as I suspect, estranged my son’s mind from his family, and all his first duties in life; with that impression on my mind, I cannot agree with your Lordship that, though my son was unfortunate, Mrs. Shelley is innocent; on the contrary, I think that her conduct was the very reverse of what it ought to have been, and I must, therefore, decline all interference in matters in which Mrs. Shelley is interested.

  At the time I am speaking of Mrs. Shelley was twenty-four. Such a rare pedigree of genius was enough to interest me in her, irrespective of her own merits as an authoress. The most striking feature in her face was her calm, grey eyes; she was rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old writers. Neither of them used obsolete or foreign words. This command of our language struck me the more as contrasted with the scanty vocabulary used by ladies in society, in which a score of poor hackneyed phrases suffice to express all that is felt or considered proper to reveal.

  Genial, gentle, sympathetic, thoughtful and matured in opinion beyond her years, for she was then but twenty-nine; essentially liberal in politics, ethics, and theology, indeed, yet devoid alike of stiff prejudice against the old or ill-considered prepossession in favor of the new; and, above all, womanly, in the best sense, in every sentiment and instinct; she impressed me also as a person with warm social feelings, dependent for happiness on loving encouragement; needing a guiding and sustaining hand…. In person, she was of middle height and graceful figure. Her face, though not regularly beautiful, was comely and spiritual, of winning expression, and with a look of inborn refinement as well as culture. It had a touch of sadness when at rest; yet when it woke up in animated conversation, one could see that underneath there was a bright, cheerful, even playful nature, at variance, I thought, with depressing circumstances and isolated position.

  Her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that time [1824] allowed to be cut low, and which her own taste adopted (for neither she nor her sister-in-sorrow ever wore the conventional “widow’s weeds” and “widow’s cap”); her thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved mouth, with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while she listened, and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility when speaking; her exquisitely formed, white, dimpled, small hands, with rosy palms, and plumply commencing fingers, that tapered into tips as slender and delicate as those in a Vandyke portrait.

  A spirit akin to that of Greek tragedy informs the double story of mother and daughter. Mary Godwin inherited her fate. The peculiar reverence in which she must necessarily have held the mother who had died to give her life, the implicit confidence with which she must have received that mother’s doctrines, and set forth in her life and preserved in her books,—this was the strongest determining influence in the life of the girl, Mary Godwin. When, at the age of seventeen, she unhesitatingly plighted her faith to a man already bound by the laws of society to another, there is significance in the fact that their hands were clasped over her mother’s grave—the spot which a woman of opposite traditions must have shunned with shame at such a moment. That sacred place seemed fittest for the strange betrothal of Mary Godwin, who had no doubt that the mother who there slept would have smiled upon the lovers. Censure of this step has properly no place in a sketch of Mary Godwin Shelley; the entire responsibility rests with Shelley and her parents; her action was simply an inevitable result.

  From the time of her union with him [Shelley] Mary had been his consoler, his cherished love, all the dearer to him for the thought that she was dependent on him and only on him for comfort and support, and enlightenment of mind; but yet she was a child,—a clever child,—sedate and thoughtful beyond her years, and full of true womanly devotion,—but still one whose first and only acquaintance with the world had been made by coming violently into collision with it, a dangerous experience, and hardening, especially if prolonged. From the time of her marriage a maturer, mellower tone is perceptible throughout her letters and writings, as though, the unnatural strain removed, and, above all, intercourse with her father restored, she glided naturally and imperceptibly into the place Nature intended her to fill, as responsible woman and wife, with social as well as domestic duties to fulfill.

  Who, in truth, can remember without profound sympathy, I had almost said, without tears, that sorrowful letter which Mary Shelley, the desolate widow, wrote on the 15th of August, 1822, to Mrs. Gisborne telling the story of those days of agony? The terrible drama of which those two women, Mrs. Shelley, and Mrs. Williams foresaw the end, is narrated with so true, so natural a crescendo of horror and of pathos as might move even the author of “The Real Shelley,” if certain critics condescended to possess hearts. If no more were known of Shelley’s beloved companion, this letter would be enough to prove how worthy she was to be invoked as “Mine own heart’s home,” as he calls her in the dedication of the “Revolt of Islam,” in which he says: “Through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see, a lamp of vestal fire burning internally.” “The days pass,” she writes after the terrible event, “pass one after another, and we still live. ‘Adonais’ is not Keats’ elegy but his very own.” Who knows how often she read, and re-read it in those twenty-nine long years during which she outlived him, widowed vestal of her one and only love? The proof is found in a copy of the Pisan edition of this poem, that she possessed, where after her death a tiny silken sack was found among the pages, containing ashes, taken by her from his funeral urn.

  It was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin who awoke in Shelley such a burst of song that men yet listen to its cadence. It was she who gave his soul wings: her gentle spirit blending with his made music that has enriched the world. Without her he was fast beating out his life against the bars of unkind condition, but together they worked and sang. All of his best lines were recited to her, all were weighed in the critical balances of her woman’s judgment. She it was who first wrote it out, and then gave it back. Together they revised; and after he had passed on, she it was who collected the scattered leaves, added the final word, and gave us the book we call “Shelley’s Poems.”

Frankenstein, 1818

  When we have thus admitted that “Frankenstein” has passages which appall the mind and make the flesh creep, we have given it all the praise (if praise it can be called) which we dare to bestow. Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing, and the greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is.

  How changed is the taste of verse, prose, and painting, since le bon vieux temps, dear madam! Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and is within—if within—a hair’s breadth of positive disgust. Some of the strange things they write remind me of Squire Richard’s visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says: “Odd, they are pure grim devils,”—particularly a wild and hideous tale called “Frankenstein.”

  Your talents are truly extraordinary. “Frankenstein” is universally known, and though it can never be a book for vulgar reading, is everywhere respected. It is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of. You are now five and twenty, and, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?

  He made some amends for his indifference to Shelley, by his admiration of Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which he thought the most extraordinary realisation of the idea of a being out of nature which had ever been effected.

  That a young creature of this age should have produced anything at once so horrible and so original as the hideous romance of “Frankenstein,” is one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature; and that she should never, having made such a beginning, have done anything more, is almost equally wonderful…. Mary Shelley’s individual appearances afterwards are only those of a romantically-desolate widow, pouring out her grief and fondness in sentimental gushes, which look somewhat overstrained and ridiculous in print, whatever they may have done in fact; but to hear her read, with her girlish lips, this most extraordinary and terrible of imaginations, must have been a sensation unparalleled. It is one of the books adopted into the universal memory, which everybody alludes to, and thousands who can never have read it understand the main incidents of—which is a wonderful instance of actual fame. That this should be merely stated as a fact in the history, and no one pause to wonder at it, is another odd instance of the insensibility of contemporaries.

  Her literary productions were few and disproportionate to her intellectual force; disappointing when viewed side by side with her peculiar gift of evoking the most artistic literary work in others…. Of Mrs. Shelley’s writings, “Frankenstein” is without question the most noteworthy. From the day of its first appearance in print down to the present, it has had accorded to it a position as a unique and remarkable production…. It is one of the few books that can be called sui generis…. The world, by its acknowledgment of the coercive quality of “Frankenstein,” has given silent acceptance of its genius. The other works, novels, critiques, biographies, while they have had literary merit, feeling, even power, have not shown genius. “Frankenstein” alone was personal, it alone reflected Mrs. Shelley’s true self. Her other books contain simply what she wrote in them: this alone contains what was written in her. Being, as she was, stronger in her personality than as a literary artist, the book that alone partook of that personality would alone partake of her peculiar genius. This, considered in its fullest light, “Frankenstein” does.

  That a work by a girl of nineteen should have held its place in romantic literature so long is no small tribute to its merit; this work, wrought under the influence of Byron and Shelley, and conceived after drinking in their enthralling conversation, is not unworthy of its origin. A more fantastically horrible story could scarcely be conceived; in fact, the vivid imagination, piling impossible horror upon horror, seems to claim for the book a place in the company of a Poe or a Hoffmann. Its weakness appears to be that of placing such an idea in the annals of modern life; such a process invariably weakens these powerful imaginative ideas, and takes away from, instead of adding to, the apparent truth, and cannot fail to give an affectation to the work. True, it might add to the difficulty to imagine a different state of society, past or future, but this seems a sine quâ non.

General

  Mrs. Shelley has published, besides a “Frankenstein,” a romance entitled “Valperga,” which is less known than the former, but is of high merit. She exhibits in her hero, a brave and successful warrior, arriving at the height of his ambition, endowed with uncommon beauty and strength, and with many good qualities, yet causes him to excite emotions of reprobation and pity, because he is cruel and a tyrant, and because in the truth of things he is unhappy. This is doing a good work, taking the false glory from the eyes and showing things as they are. There are two female characters of wonderful power and beauty. The heroine is a lovely and noble creation. The work taken as a whole, if below “Frankenstein” in genius, is yet worthy of its author and of her high rank in the aristocracy of genius, as the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the widow of Shelley.

  Mrs. Shelley found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento, she says. Oh that book—does one wake or sleep? The “Mary dear” with the brown eyes, and Godwin’s daughter and Shelley’s wife, and who surely was something better once upon a time—and to go through Rome and Florence and the rest, after what I suppose to be Lady Londonderry’s fashion: the intrepidity of the commonplace quite astounds me.

  Her command of history and her imaginative power are shown in such books as “Valperga” and “Castruccio;” but the daring originality of her mind comes out most distinctly in her earliest published work, “Frankenstein.”

  It [“Lodore”] differs from the others in being a novel of society, and has been stigmatised, rather unjustly, as weak and colourless, although at the time of its publication it had a great success. It is written in a style which is now out of date, and undoubtedly fails to fulfill the promise of power held out by “Frankenstein” and to some extent by “Valperga,” but it bears on every page the impress of the refinement and sensibility of the author, and has, moreover, a special interest of its own, due to the fact that some of the incidents are taken from actual occurrences in her early life, and some of the characters sketched from people she had known.

  Mary undoubtedly received more than she gave. Nothing but an absolute magnetising of her brain by Shelley’s can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in “Frankenstein.” The phenomenon might have been repeated but for the crushing blow of the death of her boy William in 1819.

  In spite of much descriptive and analytic talent she shared the inaptitude for history which marked the Godwinian and Radcliffian schools alike. “The Last Man” … has a pathetic significance as shadowing her own tragic loneliness,—the “Loneliness of Crusoe”—as she herself long afterwards declared it to have been.