Pancras churchyard, reading her mother’s work. The remark is not as figurative as it may first appear: Mary spent a considerable amount of time at her mother’s grave in the St. (In light of her daughter’s creative output, it’s worth mentioning that puerperal fever was then often transmitted by doctors proceeding directly from autopsies to births.)Īfter that, Mary Shelley’s “only real ‘mother’ was a tombstone,” as Sandra M. Poignand, who removed the placenta piece by piece with unwashed hands, and who transmitted the puerperal fever that killed Wollstonecraft Godwin days after giving birth. Baby Mary, however, was not the fatal agent: It was the physician, one Dr.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant feminist best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died shortly after giving birth to Mary, a fact that haunted her daughter for the rest of her life. Yet only one of Mary Shelley’s parents lived to see Frankenstein published. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explains: “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.” She is answering an oft-asked question-the nineteenth-century equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing writing gross stuff like this?”-and the fact that she begins by mentioning her parents is a sign of how greatly they figured in her sense of self.

William godwin mary shelley