Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851)
This mother-daughter pair, who were together only 10 days after Mary Shelley's birth, were much alike. Both overcame enormous pressure to live by their writings and to be the equal of men. Charlotte Gordon, the author of Romantic Outlaws, a book about the pair, emphasizes the similarities between mother and daughter and the desire they shared "To be themselves. The hurdles, the critics, the enemies, the insults, the ostracism, the betrayals, the neglect, even the heartbreaks - none of these had stopped them. Nothing stopped them writing." Before Gordon's book, the two had never been brought together in a dual biography. "They have historically been taught as separate figures, but Mary Shelley was an expert on her mother. She read every book her mother ever wrote countless times. She was an expert on all things Wollstonecraft."
Both were authors of world-changing books." Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and Godwin wrote Frankenstein (1818). Godwin's novel is a case in point - when I first read it six decades ago, the author was her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later, it was grudgingly acknowledged that she may have contributed; later still, when evidence showed that it might have been written by Godwin, the brilliance of the book was attributed to the guidance and editing of her husband. But in fact, she wrote it. Herself. So the bias and evil done against her and her mother, and the millions of women like them, still perpetuate after three centuries.
I was unable to reproduce a picture of Mary Godwin Shelley.
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