The graveyard became Mary’s private place, where she would often retreat. He would have thought this was an excellent way to teach his daughter about her famous mother,” Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, tells TIME. “ would not have thought this was macabre. In the run-up to Mary’s birth in 1797, Wollstonecraft sent a note to Godwin as she waited for the midwife, eccentrically referring to Mary as their “animal”: And after their marriage, Godwin and Wollstonecraft preferred to live separately during the day and communicate by correspondence, exchanging notes and letters. Her father was a drunk and she had an illegitimate child, a daughter called Fanny Imlay, before marrying Mary’s father, the famous philosopher William Godwin. Wollstonecraft was a radical thinker, vilified for her feminist ideas, and even called a “hyena in petticoats” by one British politician, Horace Walpole. But even in death, Wollstonecraft played a pivotal role in Mary’s life. She did not live to see her daughter grow up to become a writer, dying of septicemia just over a week after giving birth to Mary. Wollstonecraft was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of the famous horror story, published 200 years ago this year, about a monster brought to life by maverick scientist Victor Frankenstein.
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