Rogue 3 - Mary Shelley

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” -Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

To your left is a portrait of Mary Shelley, our next Rogue’s Gallery exhibit. She’s more of a badass than you and I will ever be. Here’s why:

1. She wrote Frankenstein. This alone qualifies her.

2. She wrote it when she was 19. When I was 19, I wrote a lot too. Those journals are locked away in a safe. I don’t know where the key is. And that’s for the best.

3. Despite being an intellectual nepobaby, she wasn’t a spoiled prick. With famous parents one is more likely to become an ass than a badass, but there are exceptions—like when you’re the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” and of William Godwin who, along with being your father, is also the Father of Philosophical Anarchism.

4. Her father taught her to read by having her trace and enunciate words on her mother’s gravestone. She must be the only toddler in history whose first words include “Vindication” and “Rights.”

5. By that same gravestone, she had her first sexual encounter. Fortunately, it wasn’t with her dad. I’m not sure this qualifies as badass, but it’s Goth.

6. She was, to follow on the last point, a romantic rogue. After escaping a Rapunzelesque sequestering, she ran away to France at age 16 with the unruly married poet Percy Shelley and had a child out of wedlock, to use a phrase that didn’t sound as ridiculous at the time. Having a child while still thus scandalously unlocked was enough to make you a social pariah. Divorce was no option in a miserable marriage,¹ so running off was the only way to follow one’s heart. And Mary Shelley valued the heart over the herd. More on that later.

7. She got enmeshed in a messy love quadrangle that included Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and her stepsister Claire. You can read a misleading trashy account of this alleged but not-quite polycule in, where else, The Sun. Aside from her philosophical support of free love, however, there’s no evidence that Mary, unlike her beloved straying Percy, was ever sexual with anyone else. Despite her resistance, Percy would later try to set her up with another man. This was long before polyamory was cliché on prestige TV and Gucci was running throuple perfume ads. Mary’s proclaimed openness aside, it was a tough sell. She finally consented, but got no further than philosophical discussions, and even those were underwhelming.

8. The setting for all this exploding passion and jissom was apt, for it was in the aftermath of the most powerful recorded volcanic eruption in history, the 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora. While they were all holed up near Lake Geneva due to the foggy, ashen, sunless, thunderous weather (called “The Year Without Summer”), Byron proposed a contest on who could write the best ghost story. Though up against the Romantic hotshots of the day, she outplayed them all with Frankenstein. This segues to the next reason:

9. She was both a brooding Romantic and a hardheaded realist. Frankenstein is, among other things, a tale about Promethean men pursuing individual glory who destroy everything around them because they lack all communal and familial responsibility. It’s an indictment of solipsistic creators and negligent fathers. Written when women had no rights to property or their children, it tells us that a world where men hold all power and where women, especially mothers, are absent or irrelevant is bound to end in unnatural disaster.

10. She was as gutsy as she was astute. She endured both the vagaries of pathetic, self-serving egoists and the outrage of clucking society shrews. She was called a whore and assumed to be as monstrous as her creation (though detractors were often surprised to find her reserved in person). Despite this mudslinging and ostracism, she never backed down, drawing strength from her mother’s works. She kept on writing and offending through poverty, hatred, and exile. She was a radical back when that involved rebelling and risk-taking rather than online grandstanding and troll-tutting. She would not cow to cancel culture. Her apocalyptic dystopia The Last Man was condemned as “diseased” and “perverted.” That a woman penned it only confirmed their suspicions that she was a banshee, a Gorgon, a Fury, a succubus.

11. Unlike celebrated childless English writers of the time like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and the Bronte sisters, Mary Shelley wrote while also shouldering the Atlantean task of motherhood. She was, in short, a 19^th century superhero.

12. She was as scarred as her most famous literary creation. Her mother died of childbed fever days after Mary was born (the delivering doctor hadn’t washed his hands). Her dearest father forgot his strenuous advocacy of individual rights and “disowned her,” to use another ridiculous phrase of the time, over her extramarital affair with Percy.² While she was writing Frankenstein, her pregnant half-sister Fanny killed herself; soon after that, Percy’s abandoned wife, also pregnant, drowned herself (the themes of guilt and self-blame in Frankenstein didn’t come from nowhere). Her prematurely born first daughter died after 13 days. Her second daughter died of dysentery upon turning one. Her first son died of malaria the following year at the age of three. Her fourth and last child, Percy, did make it to old age but his namesake didn’t: Mary’s husband Percy drowned off Italy at the age of 29. If you ever need perspective in hard times, just think of Mary Shelley.

13. Speaking of broken hearts, after Percy drowned, his corpse was burned on a beach pyre. As the fire subsided, all that remained were charred bones and a blackened entity assumed to be his heart. This fleshy remnant was snatched from the fire and eventually given to Mary. In 1852, a year after she died, her son Percy found in her drawer his father’s heart—or at least what everyone wanted to believe was his heart—wrapped in, what else, his poetry. If you tried to write such a scene into a novel, it would be edited out as too over-the-top. She was pure Goth to the end.

As you can see, in this Rogue’s Gallery profile, I’ve resorted to humor, the last refuge of the desperate, because Mary Shelley’s life held so much tragedy that I feel unqualified to approach it any other way.

May we all navigate misfortune so boldly.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 1797-1851. Anti-Promethean Promethean. Tragic hero. Badass.

1. Even in the case of cruelty, a divorce required an act of Parliament, which was as attainable as an act of God. “Cruelty” is also a relative term. Husbands not only could beat wives but were supposed to beat them to promote social harmony. In fact, some believe that the phrase “rule of thumb” comes from the 1782 ruling of a British judge who claimed husbands shouldn’t use whips on their wives thicker than their thumbs. This was known as ‘chastising one’s wife in moderation.’

2. Only later, when she married Percy in part to regain her father’s affection, did her father again speak to her. So much for the big anti-marriage anarchist.