Mary Shelley's Life Shined Through her Work
Born to two radical novelists in 1797, Mary Shelley had the gift and passion of writing in her blood. Going through many hardships in her life such as the death of her mother and two children, Shelley used her writing as a relief (Holiday12). It is apparent in her work that her childhood and life as a young adult greatly affected her novels as well as the characters she wrote about.
Through out Mary Shelley's books, she seems to be drawn to the concept of a child-parent bond. She first displays this in Matidia, the story of a father's incestuous love for his daughter brought on by her resemblance of her dead mother. In her novella, The Mourner, she explores the motif of a daughter's abandonment of her mother at an early age. The Mourner is commonly compared to Matidia and often criticied for not living up to the originonal (McKeeverr1).
English: Portrait of Mary Shelley
English: Cropped portrait of Mary Shelley
Writing in the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft i...Falkner, her final novel, was written about a man and his adopted daughter, "her investigation of extreme psychological states is modeled on the introspected fictions of her father, William Godwin (Todd2)". The majority of her parent- child plots concern a father and daughter, but in her first published piece, Frankenstein, she develops a fictitious plot to convey the same signification. The main character is a monster that was created by a mad scientist who rejected him. These ideas are related back to Mary's life in two different ways. The abandonment she had bestowed on her two children that she had miscarried, lead her in a life of guilt and pain. During March of 1815 she wrote in her journal,
...stay at home and think of my little dead baby...always come back to the same point--that I was a mother and am...