to a boarding school and—later—to stay
with family friends in Scotland. “I am
anxious that she should be brought up
like a philosopher,” William Godwin
wrote her guardians, “even like a cynic.”
After returning to London in May
1814, 15-year-old Mary met—and fell
in love with—the poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley, her father’s 20-year-old pro-
tégé. The privileged son of a Parliament
member and wealthy landowner,
Shelley had been expelled from Oxford
in 1811 because of his avowed atheism,
which was precisely what drew him
to Godwin. “You will be surprised at
hearing from a stranger,” Shelley wrote
the older man in 1812, hoping to arrange
a meeting. “I am convinced I could rep-
resent myself to you in such terms as
not to be thought wholly unworthy of
your friendship.”
At first Godwin was reluctant to
entertain the would-be acolyte, but
after Shelley announced that he was
“the son of a man of fortune in Sussex,”
the chronically insolvent older writer
may have felt that Shelley could help
him financially. Soon the poet became
a frequent houseguest, though it turned
out Shelley himself was virtually broke,
and his domestic arrangements were a
mess, too: He was estranged from his
19-year-old wife, Harriet, with whom
he’d eloped only a few years before and
who had given birth to his daughter in
June 1813.
None of this stopped Shelley from
wooing Mary. He had, after all, been
influenced by her father’s impor-
tant 1793 work, Political Justice, which
called marriage an “odious monopoly.”
Mary was equally unconcerned with
potential impropriety. With the help of
16-year-old Jane, the couple was soon
secretly courting in the St. Pancras
churchyard—an unlikely spot, given
that Mary’s mother was buried there.
The churchyard was also notoriouslyCHRISTABEL FINDS GERALDINE
by William Gershom Collingwood,
shows the characters from
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem
“Christabel” (left), which Byron
(shown here at Villa Diodati)
read out loud at Lake Geneva,
helping to inspire Mary’s
Frankenstein. (Coleridge had
earlier been inspired by the work
of Mary’s mother, writer Mary
Wollstonecraft.)16 LIFE FRANKENSTEIN
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