Born August 30, 1797 to political radicals William Godwin (Caleb Williams, etc.) and Mary Wollestonecraft (Vindication of the rights of women).

Parents believed in communal property, the ideals of the French Revolution, free love, they were against marriage. Mary Wollestonecraft was considered revolutionary because her work exposed the status of women as second-class citizens in the world, and complained about the injustices of the political system and of marriage. She was also considered scandalous because of several fairly public love affairs (Godwin’s biography).

But Mary and William married 5 months before their only daughter was born. Mary Wollestonecraft died ten days later from an infection caused by birth complications. Her daughter was named Mary for her.

Mary was brought up in a very intellectually stimulating, though not particularly warm, environment. Her father numbered many important literary and political characters among his friends, including Coleridge whose "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" appears here in Frankenstein.

Mary was, from her youth, educated to become a literary figure.

In June 1814 at 16 she and Percy Byshhe Shelley, 22, a poet and a disciple of her father’s, elope to Europe together taking her stepsister with them, and leaving behind his young daughter, his very pregnant wife (with whom he had also eloped when she was 16) and her very angry father.

The three of them travel around Europe before returning to London. Mary gives birth several months later to a premature daughter who dies.

At the time of writing Frankenstein in 1816, the couple has moved to the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They have an infant son, William, who will live a few more years. Mary’s stepsister Claire is in a relationship with Byron, another Romantic Poet who lives nearby. The group, plus Byron’s personal doctor, Polidori, set up a ghost story writing game.

Mary Shelley is all of 19.

The novel is published anonymously in 1818.

The novel Frankenstein begins with the story of Robert Walton, on an excursion to find a Northern Passage, as told in letters to his sister Margaret Saville back home in England.

Sailing into the frozen north he and his crew find Victor afloat on an iceberg.

Later Robert’s voice is supplanted by his transcriptions of Victor Frankenstein’s story, still ostensible being written in letters to Margaret.

This sets up layers of distance between the readers and the voices of the characters. Victor speaks to the reader through Robert writing to Margaret, and later a third character will speak through Victor speaking to Robert writing to Margaret. Whew! The importance of who can be heard and whose voice is unmediated is particularly important to the structure of the novel.

Since Victor, from the beginning, seems to be a character who can speak, remain silent to such a degree about the creature, refraining from telling his story to Henry, and even refusing to speak in Justine’s defense.

Note the ego: "The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore at my bosom and would not forego their hold" (82).