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Updated: September 19, 2025
Shelley was then only nineteen and very changeable. He would make such a sudden departure from a place where he had vowed "to live forever," that specially invited guests sometimes came to find him gone. He soon fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant woman who later wrote the weird romance Frankenstein, and he married her after Harriet Shelley had drowned herself.
Leon, published in 1799, was another attempt to give the domestic affections their due place in his scheme of life; and the description of Marguerite, drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft, and that of her wedded life with St. Leon, are beautiful passages illustrative of Godwin's own happy time of marriage. In July 1799, the death of Mr.
Kegan Paul's opinion may be here advantageously cited. "Her accounts of the Bastille siege and of the Versailles episode," he says, "are worth reading beside those of the master to whose style they are so great a contrast. Carlyle has seized on the comic element in the march to Versailles, Mary Wollstonecraft on the tragic; and hers seems to me the worthier view."
Sad as was the fate of the Bloods and much as they needed her, the Bishop household was still sadder and its appeals more urgent, and Mary hurried thither at once. No one can read the life of Mary Wollstonecraft without loving her, or follow her first bitter struggles without feeling honor, nay reverence, for her true womanliness which bore her bravely through them.
Wollstonecraft remained for three years. In September 1796, I accompanied my wife in a visit to this spot. No person reviewed with greater sensibility, the scenes of her childhood. We found the house uninhabited, and the garden in a wild and ruinous state.
But so long as her husband was alive, and he knew he had no right to do so, he, with perfect equanimity, regulated his affection to suit the circumstances. But he never reasoned either for or against his love for Mary Wollstonecraft. It sprang from his heart, and it had grown into a strong passion before he had paused to deliberate as to its advisability.
After reading Hume, and Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, he had decided that Christianity as defined by the Church of England was a failure: it was only an organized fetish, kept in place by the State, and devoid of all that thrills to noble thinking and noble doing. And so young Shelley at Oxford had written a pamphlet to this end, explaining the matter to the world.
By devoting myself more particularly to wife or child with an exclusive affection which is not in the abstract altogether reasonable, I may do more for the general good than I could achieve by a severely impartial benevolence. He developed this view first in his Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, then in the preface to St. Leon, and finally in the pamphlet which answered Mackintosh and Dr. Parr.
This and the romances which followed it show the powerful influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader. The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27th of April 1759. Her father's name was Edward John, and the name of her mother Elizabeth, of the family of Dixons of Ballyshannon in the kingdom of Ireland: her paternal grandfather was a respectable manufacturer in Spitalfields, and is supposed to have left to his son a property of about 10,000l.
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