Mary Shelley

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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (U.K.; née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prosecutors (1818).

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Romantic poet and scholar, was also editor and promoter of her husband's works.

William Godwin, a political scholar, was married to Mary Wollstonecraft, philosopher and feminist. Shelley's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her.

She was raised by her father, who was able to provide her with a rich if informal education, instilling in her adherence to his own anarchist political views.

Shelley's father married a neighbor with whom Shelley had a turbulent relationship in 1814. Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of her father's political followers, was still married when she was four years old.

Percy and her older sister, Claire Clairmont, departed for France and travelled through Europe together.

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Life and career

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the first child of philosopher, writer, and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. By the American speculator Gilbert Imlay, Godwin was forced to bring up Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child. Godwin wrote his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of Women (1798), a year after Wollstonecraft's death, which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, they were nevertheless shocked when the Memoirs announced Wollstonecraft's affair and her illegitimate child. Mary Godwin enjoyed these memoirs and her mother's books and was encouraged to keep her mother's memory alive.

Mary's earliest years were joyful, judging from William Godwin's letter to housekeeper and nurse Louisa Jones' letters. But Godwin was often in debt; feeling that he could not raise the children by himself, he considered a second wife. He married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own, in December 1801. The majority of Godwin's family feared his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and quarrelsome; but Godwin was devoted to her, and the union was a success. On the other hand, Mary Godwin appeared to condemn her stepmother. Mrs Godwin's nineteenth-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later said that she preferred her own children over Mary Wollstonecraft's.

The Godwins formed M. J. Godwin, a publishing company that also sold children's books, maps, and games. However, the company did not succeed, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going. He continued to borrow to pay off previous loans, exacerbating his debt. Godwin's venture was close to failing by 1809, and he was "near to despair." Philosophical devotees such as Francis Place, who loaned Godwin more money, saved him from debtor's prison.

Though Mary Godwin received no formal education, her father taught her in a variety of fields. He often took the children out of school, and they had access to his library and the many intellectuals who visited him, including Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice president of the United States Aaron Burr. According to Mary Wollstonecraft's teaching methods, the children were not taught, but Mary Godwin nevertheless received an unusual and high education for a woman of the time. In manuscript, she had a governess, a daily tutor, and read several of her father's Roman and Greek history. She attended a boarding school in Ramsgate for six months in 1811. "Singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and alert of thought," her father described her at age 15. Her love of knowledge is high, and her tenacity in everything she does makes her almost invincible."

Mary's father asked her to remain with the radical William Baxter family near Dundee, Scotland, in June 1812. "I am worried that she will be brought up... like a scholar and even as a cynic," Baxter wrote. Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, to be booted from the seamy side of the industry, or to introduce her to radical politics. Mary Godwin revelled in Baxter's spacious interiors and in the company of his four children, and she returned north in 1813 for a second stay of ten months. "I wrote first," she wrote in Frankenstein's 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, but in the most common-place style." My true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and nurtured under the trees of our house's grounds, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical poet-philosopher, may have first met her in Scotland during the interlude between her two lives. Percy Shelley had been estranged from his wife by that time and was regularly visiting William Godwin, whom she had agreed to pay out of debt, by the time she returned home for a second time on March 30, 1814. Percy Shelley's radicalism, as well as his economic views, had alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family: they wanted him to follow established landed aristocratic traditions, and they wanted to give substantial amounts of the family's funds to programs aimed to assist the poor. Percy Shelley, on the other hand, had trouble accessing money until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him to waste it on "political justice" programs. Shelley said he could not or wouldn't pay off all of Godwin's debts after several months of promises. Godwin was furious and betrayed.

Mary and Percy started meeting each other secretly at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St Pancras Old Church's churchyard, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. Shelley and Godwin revealed their love for one another on June 26th, 1814, when Shelley confessed that they could not conceal his "ardent passion" and led her in a "extraordinary and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley on a "very rare and rapturous moment" as Shelley revealed her love for one another; the churchyard's tradition holds that it occurred. Godwin referred to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly appearances." Mary's displeasure, her father disapproved and attempted to thwart the marriage and save his daughter's "potless glory." Shelley's father learned of his father's inability to pay off the father's debts at the same time. Mary, who later wrote of "my overt and romantic attachment to my father," was confused. Percy Shelley was a personification of her parents' liberal and liberist ideals of the 1790s, especially Godwin's assertion that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 version of Political Justice but later retracted. The couple eloped and covertly left France on July 28, 1814, carrying Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.

The trio travelled to Paris and then to Switzerland, where they had to convince Mary Jane Godwin, who had followed them to Calais, that they did not want to return, then went by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot through a France recently devastated by war in a land recently devastated by war in France. "It was behaving like a novel being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley remembered in 1826. "The agony of the people, who's houses had been raked, their cattle were killed, and all their wealth had been destroyed has given rise to my detestation of war," Godwin wrote about France in 1814. When they traveled, Mary and Percy read books by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. At Lucerne, the three children were forced to leave due to a lack of funds. They traveled down the Rhine and landed to Maassluis, the Dutch port, arriving in Gravesend, Kent, on September 13, 1814.

Mary Godwin's England entanglement was fraught with unexpected difficulties, some of which she had not prepared for. She had become pregnant either before or during the journey. She and Percy are now penniless, and her father, to Mary's surprise, had nothing to do with her. Claire and Claire migrated to Somers Town, and then Nelson Square. Perpety Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and writer Thomas Love Peacock, entertained them with their intense reading and writing, as well as Perpetu's friends. Percy Shelley was often left home for brief stretches of time to avoid creditors. The couple's bitter letters reveal their agony at these separations.

Mary Godwin, a pregnant and often sick, had to deal with Percy's excitement at his son's birth by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 and his frequent outings with Claire Clairmont. Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, causing a great deal of jealousy on Godwin's part. Shelley strongly offended Godwin at one point during a walk in the French countryside, he suggested that they both take the plunge into a canal naked to offend her principles. She was partially consoled by Hogg's visits, who she feared at first but then met a new acquaintance. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary Godwin and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the possibility because she was firmly committed to free love in principle. In practice, she adored Percy Shelley but seems she went no further than flirting with Hogg. She gave birth to a two-month old baby girl on February 22, 1815, when she wasn't expected to live.

On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg:

Mary Godwin, who was haunted by images of the baby, was depressed by her child's death, but she conceived again and recovered by the summer. The couple holidayed in Percy Shelley's finances after his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, died and rented a two-story cottage on the edge of Windsor Great Park, and then rented a two-story cottage at Bishopsgate. Since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816, little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life. Percy's poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, was written at Bishopsgate, Percy, and Mary gave birth to William, her second child, who was named after her father on January 24th, who was later dubbed "Willmouse" after her father. Windsor was later imagined as a Garden of Eden in her book The Last Man.

Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son, John Godwin, travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont in May 1816. They planned to spend the summer with poet Lord Byron, whose latest affair with Claire had left her pregnant. She explains the particularly desolate landscape of crossing from France to Switzerland in the History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a portion of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (1817).

On May 14th, the party assembled in Geneva, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley." Percy Shelley and John William Polidori, a young doctor, and their rented the Villa Diodati in Cologny close to Lake Geneva; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront waterfront downtown. They spent their time writing, sailing on the lake, and generally talking late into the night.

"It was a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and relentless rain often restricted us for days." The company amused themselves with German ghost tales, prompting Byron to suggest that they "each write a ghost story." Young Mary Godwin, who was unable to think of a story, became anxious: "Have you considered a tale?" Each morning, I was asked, and every morning I was prompted to respond with a horrifying negative." The topic of life itself was brought to the fore of life in one mid-June evening. "Perhaps a corpse would be revived," Mary said; "galvanism had no hint of such things." It was after midnight, and they were unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she embraced the terrors of her "waking nightmare" -- her ghost story:

She started writing what seemed to be a short story. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prosecuheus, was Percy Shelley's encouragement and creation of Percy Shelley's first book, Frankenstein, which was published in 1818. "When I first stepped out from childhood to life," she later referred to the summer in Switzerland. Frankenstein's story has been fictionalized numerous times and has inspired a number of films.

Donald Olson, an astronomer from Lake Geneva, spent the next year on the moon and stars, collecting evidence about the moon's movement, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2am and 3 a.m." in September 1816, several days after Lord Byron's original proposal that they each write a ghost story.

Although Percy's encouragement inspired her writing, Percy's contribution to the book is uncertain and has been criticized by readers and critics alike. "I certainly did not owe one incident nor barely of one train of thought to my husband," Mary Shelley said, but it would not have taken the form in which it was displayed to the world." Percy's preface to the first edition was "as far as I can recall." The 1818, 1823, and 1831 editions are all different, with Percy's editing being attributed to Percy's editing. Perpety's "assistance at every stage of the book's production was so extensive that one has no idea whether to think him as editor or minor collaborator," James Rieger later said, Percy only "made numerous scientific changes and several times clarified the text's narrative and thematic continuity." Percy's contributions to the book, according to Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile version of the Frankenstein manuscripts, "weren't more than what most publishers' editors had uncovered new (or old) authors, or, in fact, what colleagues have shared to each other after reading each other's work in progress."

"Why hasn't Mary Shelley treated with the reverence she so richly deserves," wrote Frankenstein on the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, literary scholar and poet Fiona Sampson. "Percy's corrections, which are also found in the Frankenstein notebooks on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been confiscated as proof that he must have at least coauthored the book in recent years." In fact, when I checked the notebooks myself, I discovered that Percy did more than any line editor working in publishing today." Sampson published her findings in In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), one of many biographies about Shelley.

On their return to England in September, Mary and Percy accompanied Claire Clairmont, who rented nearby, to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire's pregnancy information private. Mary Godwin had two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who told her that she had "unhealthy life"; on October 9, Fanny wrote a "alarming letter" from Bristol that sent Percy Shelley off to look for her, but no success. Fanny Imlay was discovered dead in a Swansea inn room on October 10th, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. Harriet, Percy Shelley's wife, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park, London, on December 10th. Both suicides were hushed up. Percy Shelley's attempts, which were largely funded by Mary Godwin, were obstructed by Harriet's family's refusal to take custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his situation by marrying; as a result of this, he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on December 30th, 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London, London. Mr and Mrs Godwin were present, and the marriage ended the family's feud.

Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on January 13th, first named Alba, then Allegra. Percy Shelley's children were not able to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family, according to the Chancery Court in March of that year. The Shelleys migrated from Albion House in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames, also in March. Clara Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on September 2nd. They entertained their new friends, Marianne and Leigh Hunt, while writing, and even talked about politics at Marlow.

Mary Shelley completed Frankenstein's manuscript, which was published anonymously in January 1818, early in the summer of 1817. Percy Shelley was the author, according to reviewers and commentators, since the book was released with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin. Mary edited the joint journal of the company's 1814 Continental journey in Marlow, Switzerland, as well as Percy's poem "Mont Blanc." The result was the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, which was released in November 1817. Percy Shelley stayed away from home in London in order to avoid creditors. The threat of a debtor's prison, their poor health, and fears of losing custody of their children contributed to the couple's departure from England for Italy on March 12, 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them. They had no intention of returning.

Alba was one of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy, and it was to Byron, who was residing in Venice, that Alba was transferred to him. Claire had agreed to raise her so long as she had nothing to do with her. The Shelleys have since embarked on a raging existence, never settling in one place for long. Along the way, they assembled a circle of friends and acquaintances with whom they often traveled. The pair devoted their time to writing, reading, teaching, sightseeing, and socializing. Mary Shelley's odyned by the deaths of both her children — Clara and William — in Venice, and William in June 1819 in Rome—in Rome, the Italian adventure was blighted. Percy Shelley, who wrote in his notebook, was left in a deep depression that separated her from Percy Shelley.

Mary Shelley found solace in her writing for a time. Percy Florence's fourth child, who died on November 12, 1819, boosted her spirits, although she ignored her missing children until the end of her life.

The Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles in Italy had political freedom unattainable at home. Despite personal losses, Italy became "a land of memory painted as paradise" for Mary Shelley. Both Shelleys' Italian years were a period of high academic and creative production. Although Percy wrote a series of major poems, Mary wrote Matilda, the historical novel Valperga, and the performances Proserpine and Midas. Since Percy refused to help her father any further, Mary wrote Valperga to assist him. She was often sick, but she was also prone to depression. Percy was also required to deal with Percy's concern for other women, including Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams. Since Mary Shelley expressed her belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she developed emotional links of her own among the men and women of their circle. She became a fan of Greek revolutionary Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, as well as Jane and Edward Williams.

The Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they remained for three months with just one visitor, a physician. They were plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former employees who Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after the Foggis married in 1820. Elena Adelaide Shelley, a two-month-old baby girl, and the pair announced on Tuesday that they had registered as his child in Naples, Percy Shelley, on February 27th. Claire Clairmont was also identified as the baby's mother by the Foggis. Many interpretations of these events have been shared by biographers: Percy Shelley's decision to adopt a local baby; Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise's by Byron. Mary Shelley said she would have known if Claire had been pregnant if she had been pregnant, but it's unclear how much she knew. The events in Naples, which Mary Shelley later described as a devil-inhabited paradise, are shrouded in secrecy. The only certainty is that she was not the child's mother. Elena Shelley died in Naples on September 9, 1820.

The Shelleys settled in Rome, where her husband wrote "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, shattered capitals, and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry," the city where her husband was born. Rome encouraged her to write Valerius, the Reanimated Roman, where the eponymous hero fights Rome's decay and the machinations of "superstitious" Catholicism. When her son William died of malaria, she wrote of her book. Shelley cried out that she had to come to Italy to improve her husband's health, but instead, the Italian climate had just killed her two children, prompting her to write: "May you, my dear Marianne, never know what it is to lose two only and beautiful children in a year—to watch their dying moments—and then be left childless and forever miserable." Shelley wrote The Fields of Fancy, which later became Matilda, about a young woman whose beauty inspired incestuous love in her father, who later commits suicide to avoid being able to express herself in his child's love, but she spends the remainder of her life with a feeling of sadness over "the unnatural love she had inspired." Although Matilda is punished in the afterlife, the novella contained a feminist account of a patriarchal society, although she did nothing to support her father's feelings.

A pregnant Mary migrated with Percy, Claire, Edward, and Jane Williams to the isolated Villa Magni in the Bay of Lerici's southwest, near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the summer of 1822. Percy recalled that her daughter Allegra died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo after they were settled in. Mary Shelley was disoriented and dissatisfied in Villa Magni, which she came to regard as a dungeon. She miscarried on June 16th, losing so much blood that she nearly died. Percy sat her in a bath of ice to stop the bleeding, rather than waiting for a doctor, an act that the doctor later told her saved her life. However, all was not well with the couple this summer, and Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and injured wife. Shelley's short poetry at San Terenzo concerned Jane rather than Mary.

Percy Shelley and Edward Williams were able to enjoy their "new boat" during the summer on the coast. Daniel Roberts and Edward Trelawny, an admirer of Byron's who had joined the party in January 1822, had the boat built. Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno on July 1st. Shelley spoke to Byron and Leigh Hunt about the unveiling of The Liberal, a radical magazine. On the eighth day of July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boat boy, Charles Vivian. They never made it to their destination. "Pray write to tell us how you got home," a letter from Hunt to Percy Shelley dated August 8th, saying they had bad weather after you sailed Monday and we are worried." "The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later. "I trembled all over." In the fading hope that their husbands were still alive, she and Jane Williams rushed to Livorno and then Pisa. Three bodies werehed up on the coast off the coast of Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici, ten days after the hurricane. Percy Shelley's body was cremated by Tre lawny, Byron, and Hunt on the beach at Viareggio.

Mary Shelley spent a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she frequently visited Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On the 23rd of July 1823, she left Genoa for England and remained with her father and stepmother in the Strand until her father-in-law's small donation enabled her to lodge nearby. Sir Timothy Shelley had initially agreed to assist his grandson, Percy Florence, but only if he was given over to an appointed guard. Shelley debating this theory right away. She managed to get a small annual allowance (which she had to pay when Percy Florenceinherited the property), but by the time he died, he was unable to meet her in person and only through lawyers. Mary Shelley, among other literary endeavors, helped edit her husband's poems, but her son's preoccupations limited her choices. Sir Timothy threatened to withhold the allowance if no biography of the poet were published. Percy Florence became the legal heir of the Shelley estate after his half-brother Charles Shelley's death, his father's son by Harriet Shelley, died in 1826. Sir Timothy brought Mary's allowance from £100 a year to £250, but it was still difficult as ever. Mary Shelley loved William Godwin's circle's vibrant social scene, but she couldn't enjoy socialising as she wanted. She was also rejected by those who, like Sir Timothy, had yet to condemn her friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London in the summer of 1824 to be near Jane Williams. Jane may have been "a little bit in love," according to her biographer Muriel Spark's description. Jane disillusioned her by rumors that Percy had chosen her to Mary, owing to Mary's inadequacy as a wife. Around this time, Mary Shelley was writing The Last Man (1826), and she helped a number of friends who were writing memoirs of Byron and Percy Shelley, the beginnings of her attempts to immortalize her husband. She also visited American actor John Howard Payne and American writer Washington Irving, who piqued her interest. Payne fell in love with her and asked her to marry him in 1826. She refused, saying she could only marry another after being married to one genius. Payne accepted the denial and tried unsuccessfully to compel Irving Irving to propose himself. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's scheme, but how seriously she took it is uncertain.

Mary Shelley was part of a scheme that allowed Isabel Robinson and Isabel's companion, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to live in France as husband and wife. Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple with the help of Payne, who was otherwise unaware of the information. When visiting them in Paris in 1828, she became sick with smallpox. She recovered, but without her youthful glow, just weeks later.

Mary Shelley was active as an editor and writer in the 1827-to-40 period. Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) were among Perkin Warbeck's books. To Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, she contributed five volumes of Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French authors. She also wrote articles for women's journals. She was still helping her father, and they were both looking out for publishers for each other. She sold the copyright for a new Frankenstein edition to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their latest Standard Novels collection in 1830. She began gathering her letters and a memoir for publication after her father's death in 1836 at the age of eighty; but after two years of service, she scrapped the initiative. Throughout this period, she also advocated Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. Percy's works by 1837 were well-known and much admired. Edward Moxon, Tennyson's publisher and Charles Lamb's son-in-law, suggested a collection of Percy Shelley's works in the summer of 1838. Mary was paid £500 to edit the Poetical Works (1838), which Sir Timothy insisted did not include a biography. Nevertheless, Mary found a way to tell the tale of Percy's life by giving extensive biographical details about the poems.

Shelley maintained her mother's feminist values by giving women support when society disapproved of it. For instance, Shelley offered Mary Diana Dods, a single mother and illegitimate herself who seems to have been a lesbian, a new name for her lover Isabel Robinson. Shelley also assisted Georgiana Paul, a woman who was banned from marrying because of suspected adultery by her husband. Shelley describes her help to the latter: "I do not make a boast-I do not say aloud behold my goodness and greatness of mind" for the sake of being worldly, and so I am still reviled for being worldly."

Mary Shelley continued to treat potential intimate interests with caution. She met and flirted with Prosperité, the French writer, but her one remaining letter to him appears to be a rejection of his declaration of love. When her old friend, Edward Trelawny, returned to England, she was thrilled, and the pair joked about marriage in their letters. Their friendship had changed, however, after Percy Shelley's refusal to participate in his proposed biography; later, he reacted angrily to Percy Shelley's removal of the atheistic portion of Queen Mab from Percy Shelley's poems. Mary Shelley's journals, dating from the 1830s to the early 1840s, have ostensibly expressed affection for the uncompromising politician Aubrey Beauclerk, who may have offended her by twice marrying others.

Percy Florence's wellbeing became Mary Shelley's first worry during the years. She honored her late husband's wish that his son attend public school and had him educated at Harrow with Sir Timothy's grudging assistance. To save boarding fees, she travelled to Harrow on the Hill so that Percy could attend as a day scholar. Despite Percy's admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, and dabbled in politics and the law, he left no trace of his parents' gifts. He was devoted to his mother, and after he left university in 1841, he went to live with her.

Mother and son traveled together on the continent in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844). Sir Timothy Shelley died at the age of ninety in 1844, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower," Mary described it. For the first time, she and her son were financially secure, but the estate was less valuable than they expected.

Mary Shelley was discovered to be the object of three separate blackmailers in the mid-1840s. Gatteschi, an Italian political exile who had met in Paris in 1845, feared to publish letters she had sent him. A friend of her son's bribe a police chief into confiscating Gatteschi's papers, which included the letters, which were then confiscated. Mary Shelley received letters from a man identified herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley posing as the illegitimate son of late Lord Byron only a few days later. Thomas Medwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin, pleaded with her in 1845, claiming to have written a derogatory biography of Percy Shelley. He promised to conceal it in return for £250, but Mary Shelley refused.

Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John in 1848. The wedding was a happy one, and Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other. Mary stayed in Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and Chester Square, London, where they were taken on foreign trips.

Mary Shelley's last years were marred by sickness. She suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in certain areas of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. She died of a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three on February 1, 1851, at Chester Square, after her physician suspected it was a brain tumour. Mary Shelley had intended to be buried with her mother and father, but Percy and Jane, who had found the graveyard in St Pancras to be "dreadful," opted to bury her instead at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, near their new home in Boscombe. The Shelleys opened her box-desk on the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death. Inside they discovered locks of her deceased children's hair, a notebook she had sold with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adona's with one page folded around a silk box carrying some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.

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