Mary Shelley: The Exceptional Woman

"As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.' Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air -- the indulging in waking dreams -- the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and
agreeable than my writings."
-Mary Shelley in an Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831)

Mary Shelley was an exceptional woman of the 19th century who went against the constraints of proper womanhood and lived a spontaneous life full of love and intellect among heartbreak and pitfalls. Through her education, intellectual influences, family and friends, and feelings about Rousseau, Mary Shelley developed into the unusual and thought provoking woman she was when she wrote Frankenstein in 1817. As Mary Shelley grew older, however, she abandoned her carefree attitude towards life and attempted to conform to the proper standards for a lady in the 1800s. From her youthful days of energy and adventure, to her lonely life after her husband died, Mary Shelley experienced many life altering events.

Radical Influences
Mary Shelley grew up surrounded by unusual people. These family and friends were those who made Shelley's upbringing unique. Her uncommon childhood and young adult years molded her into the creative and impulsive person she was when Frankenstein was scripted in 1817.
Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her friends, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and John Pollidori, and her close acquaintances, Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, all influenced Mary Shelley a great deal during this time period.
Typically, a young girl in the early 19th century would not grow up around novelists, poets, and philosophers, have a mother who was a passionate feminist, or a father who was friends with Samuel T. Coleridge. However, Mary Shelley experienced this upbringing.
Click here for biographies of the above friends, family members, and radical influences of Mary Shelley from 1810-1820.

The Proper Lady
In her early years, Mary Shelley went against the stereotypical "Proper Lady" and discovered her own path.
During Mary Shelley's upbringing, women were taught to be sweet, pleasant, amiable, and to support and obey their husbands. They were valued by their modesty and chastity and were supposed to be completely ignorant of their sexuality. Shelley obviously did not follow this formula. At the age of sixteen, she ran off with radical Percy Bysshe Shelley, and traveled with him around Europe. Although she was shunned by her father and society, Shelley drew inspiration while on these journeys to write her breakthrough novel, Frankenstein.
A woman's contribution to society was believed to be self control and morality. Many women were involved in the church through practicing selfless activities where no masculine traits were thought to be required. Vain, passionate, assertive, and opinionated women were practically unheard of and these qualities were frowned upon in a woman. Instead, women were valued by their loyalty to their man, their purity and chastity, and their modesty. All of these innocent attributes were to shine through their husband.
Although Mary Shelley eventually wed Percy Shelley, they were unmarried and traveling together for a time before their marriage, completely going against the norm of the time period. In addition to this aspect of their unaccepted way of life, Percy was still married when he and Mary ran off together. Definitely a scandal!
It is interesting to note, however, that in the above painting, Mary Shelley looks quite like a "Proper Lady." She is proper, prim, slightly smiling, yet not revealing too much. She looks pleasant, pretty, and one could even say a bit boring.
Mary Shelley was not a "Proper Lady" in her early years. Blessed with a sense of adventure and excitement, she chose to venture outside of the stereotypical norm of the "Proper Lady." Shelley upset her parents and ran off with Percy, traveled through Europe, married, wrote a novel, had a child, and was widowed all before she was twenty-five years old. Mary Shelley was definitely an individual.

Intellectual Influences and Education
Throughout her life, and especially in her childhood, Mary Shelley was surrounded by great intellectuals and scholars. She incorporated many theories and notions of radical progressives into Frankenstein, namely Rousseau and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, enhancing the value of the story and creating it into a hidden masterpiece.
Books which characters read in the novel include The Bible, comte de Volney's Ruins of the Empires, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Parcelsus' Alchemistry.

Although Mary Shelley never had a formal education, she spent the majority of her time reading and studying on her own. In her journal entries, she religiously kept noted what she read everyday or what she and Percy Shelley read together. On Tuesday March 21, 1815 she wrote, "Talk, and then read Gibbon. Shelley reads Livy, and then reads Gibbon with me till dinner. After dinner play at chess and read. Peacock comes to tea. Work. After he goes away I read Gibbon (p. 275), and Shelley reads Livy (p. 406)." These entries changed from day to day, interchanging reading with taking a walk, traveling, or engaging in mealtime conversations with visitors.

Indicated in her journal entries between 1814-1828, Mary Shelley read enormous amount of literature including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Milton, Plutarch, William Shakespeare, Homer, John Keats, and Thomas Moore. Amazingly, she read many of these works before she was seventeen, when she wrote Frankenstein.

It was not unusual that Mary Shelley did not receive a formal education. However, it no small accomplishment that she studied and read all of these authors so feverishly. Her self-education makes her a sort of "self-made woman." After reading the ideas and works of all of these great authors, primarily men, Mary then formulated her own theories and notions. It is significant to note that the only woman whose work Mary read was her own mother's, Mary Wollstonecraft. This shows how unusual it was for a woman to publish a work and to be well-educated.
Mary Shelley's self-education allowed her to be the creator of an intensely intellectual literary and historical masterpiece, the 1817 Frankenstein.

Rousseau’s Influence on Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley saw Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a man "with an imagination that warmed him to daring." In her 1839 book, Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France Volume II, Shelley clearly conveys the intellectual debt she has to Rousseau.
Although Shelley was deeply influenced by Rousseau's work, she did not respect some of his choices in life. He abandoned his children to an orphanage, to which Shelley commented, "Rousseau failed in this....the distortion of intellect that blinded him to the first duties of life, we are inclined to believe to be allied to that vein of insanity, that made him an example among men for self-inflicted sufferings." She felt that because he was the bearer of such intense intellect, it was his right to bring up his children and pass on his vast amounts of knowledge to them.
Rousseau also had relationships with various women, of which Shelley did not fully approve. When comparing him to his wife Therese, she scorned him, saying, "he deserves more [blame] for having chosen, in the first place, an ignorant woman, who had no qualities of heart to compensate for stupidity; and secondly, for having injured instead of improving her disposition by causing her to abandon her children, and taking from her the occupations and interests that attend maternity." Mary Shelley clearly did not approve of his treatment of Therese and felt that he should have been more sensible in his choice of a companion.
Despite how Mary Shelley felt about Rousseau's personal affairs, she was incredibly moved by his intellectual work, particularly, Emile. She praised this piece and exalted Rousseau. She describes it as a "success" and "a book that deserves higher praise" than his 1760 Nouvelle Heloise. Clearly, Mary Shelley was moved by this work and was saddened that "this admirable work, whence generations of men derive wisdom and happiness, was the origin of violent persecution against the author; and, by expelling him from his home, and exposing him into a state of mind allied to madness, and devoted him to poverty and sorrow to the end of his life." She is obviously upset that such a renowned work would have cost Rousseau happiness in life.
Although Mary Shelley's critique of Rousseau is half critical and half enthusiastic, she was deeply moved and influenced by his thoughts and dreams. Her description of the Creature in Frankenstein closely resembles her documentation of Rousseau's wanderings throughout Europe during his days of exile. The proximity between the two is unmistakable.
In many ways, Mary Shelley personally related to Rousseau. Both of their mothers died from childbirth complications, they were both dreamers, yet outcasts, and both found inspiration in solitude. Their unspoken connection comes clear through Mary Shelley's narration of the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

After Frankenstein
In the years after Percy Shelley's death in 1822, Mary Shelley went through a self-identification crisis. Did she later conform to the ways of the proper lady after all?

Mary's defiant behavior in her late-teens and early-twenties thrust her from society's inner-circle. Her father, William Godwin, completely dismissed Mary and claimed that "he did not know her very well," according to historian Mary Poovey. However, Mary was not phased by his views or the pressures of society to conform, and she did as she pleased, running of with Percy Shelley.
However, after his death, Mary's foundation crumbled. She had gone through the death of a child and two suicides in her family, her father ended all communication with Mary, and she seemed very much alone in the world. At this point in time, Mary felt it was time for a social makeover.
To do this, Mary Shelley used her authority as an author to change people's perception of herself. Her last three novels, Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), all have "thinly disguised autobiographical characterizations of herself as a docile, domestic heroine," and because of this, she was able to "court the approval of a middle-class, largely female audience" (Poovey 117).
In a 1838 journal entry, Mary wrote phrases such as, "I am not a person of opinions," "I am not for violent extremes," and "I am far from making up my mind." It almost seems an oxymoron that Mary Shelley is saying this about herself. Clearly, she was one of the most progressive female thinkers of her era. Why would she claim not to have opinions or that she was indecisive? She was attempting to persuade herself into being the proper lady.
Mary Shelley was caught in a trap. "On the one hand, she repeatedly bowed to the conventional prejudice against aggressive women by apologizing for or punishing her self-assertion.... On the other hand,...Mary Shelley demonstrated that imaginative self-expression was for her an important vehicle for proving her worth and, in that sense, defining herself." (Poovey 115).
One could infer that Mary possibly regretted her early life full of spontaneity and rebellion. However, when reading Mary's journal entries before 1822, it seems like Mary could be in no happier place in her life. However, once she was left to face life on her own, Mary clearly struggled to live up to society's expectations, and she fought an inner-battle over how she would present herself to the world.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257s02/students/Lindsay/maryshelley.htm