Mary Shelley’s Obsession with the Cemetery / Bess Lovejoy In: JSTOR Daily October 3, 2018

In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explains: “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.” She is answering an oft-asked question—the nineteenth-century equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing writing gross stuff like this?”—and the fact that she begins by mentioning her parents is a sign of how greatly they figured in her sense of self.

Yet only one of Mary Shelley’s parents lived to see Frankenstein published. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant feminist best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died shortly after giving birth to Mary, a fact that haunted her daughter for the rest of her life. Baby Mary, however, was not the fatal agent: It was the physician, one Dr. Poignand, who removed the placenta piece by piece with unwashed hands, and who transmitted the puerperal fever that killed Wollstonecraft Godwin days after giving birth. (In light of her daughter’s creative output, it’s worth mentioning that puerperal fever was then often transmitted by doctors proceeding directly from autopsies to births.)
After that, Mary Shelley’s “only real ‘mother’ was a tombstone,” as Sandra M. Gilbert writes. The remark is not as figurative as it may first appear: Mary spent a considerable amount of time at her mother’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, reading her mother’s work. Her father, the reformist writer and philosopher William Godwin, first took her to the churchyard when she was a child, and Mary continued visiting on her own, especially after father married his next-door-neighbor Mary Jane Clairmont—whom Mary found insufferable—and her home life became considerably strained.
“Especially because she never knew her mother … her principal mode of self-definition—certainly in the early years of her life with Shelley, when she was writing Frankenstein—was through reading,” Gilbert says. “Endlessly studying her mother’s works and her father’s, Mary Shelley may be said to have ‘read’ her family and to have been related to her reading, for books appear to have functioned as her surrogate parents, pages and words standing in for flesh and blood.” And much of Mary’s reading during her younger years took place in the graveyard.
The cemetery took on a new relevance when Percy Shelley burst upon the scene. The Godwins maintained an intellectual household, with visitors such as the radical essayist William Hazlitt, the painter Thomas Lawrence, the chemist Humphry Davy, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who once allowed Mary and her stepsister to hear a recitation of The Ancient Mariner after the pair were discovered hiding under the sofa). But none had such an influence on Mary as Percy, a fervent admirer of her father’s who came for dinner one night in late 1812. The pair met again in 1814 and, despite the fact that Mary was only 16 and the 21-year-old poet was married (to another 16-year-old), began taking walks together in the St. Pancras churchyard. Mary was attracted by his idealism, fearlessness and what his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg called his “wild, intellectual, unearthly” looks. ... [mehr] https://daily.jstor.org/mary-shelleys-obsession-with-the-cemetery/