Mary Shelley's Real Name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

Quick answer: Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that she was born August 30, 1797, in London and died February 1, 1851, in London, and that she is best known as the author of Frankenstein (1818) (Encyclopaedia Britannica; Encyclopedia.com).

Real name and early life

Britannica also lists the forms Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She was the only daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 11 days after the birth (Encyclopedia.com says 10 days). In 1801 her father married Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought two children into the household; Encyclopedia.com and Britannica both describe a difficult relationship with the stepmother and a period living with family connections in Scotland. She received no formal education but grew up among writers who visited her father. At 11 she published a children's tale, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, through her father's publishing house, according to Britannica.

Career highlights

Most scholars, Britannica says, place her first meeting with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in November 1812, or possibly later; Encyclopedia.com says they met when she was 14 and became close two years later, and that the couple left England together in July 1814, a month before her seventeenth birthday. The "haunted summer" of 1816, spent with Percy Shelley and others near Geneva, led to the writing of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. Britannica calls it a seminal work of Romanticism and a Gothic horror classic, also considered one of the first science-fiction novels.

In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast, at age 29. Mary Shelley continued to write, including the novels Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), and later literary-historical work. Britannica often ranks The Last Man, an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, as her best work after Frankenstein. In 1817 she also coauthored the travel book History of a Six Weeks' Tour. Encyclopedia.com stresses her later work as an editor and critic of her husband's writing.

Death

She died in London on February 1, 1851, according to both sources. Britannica says she was 53 and that the cause is believed to have been a belatedly diagnosed brain tumor. After Percy's death she remained in Italy for a year, Encyclopedia.com notes, then returned to England with her surviving son, Percy Florence, and continued to write, sometimes publishing anonymously.

Name notes for searchers

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is her birth name; after her union and later marriage with Percy Bysshe Shelley she was known as Mary Shelley or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Searchers looking for the author of Frankenstein are aiming at the same person.