9). Victor, too, made analogies between the labors of the writer and the creator, describing himself as the “miserable origin and author” (p. 90) of the catastrophic scenario. Mary would have been pleased by the description in her obituary of Frankenstein as “the parent of whole generations” of literary descendants (Sunstein, p. 384) .

Mary’s use of the word “progeny” betrays the fact that two concerns preoccupied her while writing and later reediting Frankenstein: children and motherhood. In 1815 , Mary (still a Godwin) gave birth to a daughter who did not live long enough to acquire a name. “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived … awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day—not in good spirits,” she wrote on March 19, two weeks after the baby’s death (Journals, vol. 1, p. 70). The death of her first child continued to haunt her every spring, leaving such a dark taint on the season of renewal that Mary declared to her half-sister, Claire: “Spring is our unlucky season” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 226). By the time Mary began writing Frankenstein in July 1816, she was nursing her second child, William. Though he was healthy, Mary’s anxieties regarding the child seem to have worked their way into Frankenstein: Victor’s young brother William meets a horrible death while Victor and Clerval engage in a walking tour of Ingolstadt’s environs.

Considering how insecure Mary was about her creative and reproductive capabilities, Frankenstein can be read as “a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth,” according to Ellen Moers in the ground-breaking study Literary Women (1976). In the novel, Victor learns the hard way of the consequences of usurping the female progenitive role. As he labors to create his monster, Victor experiences pain and insecurities that are typical of pregnancy’s gestation period; his shock at seeing his deformed and hideous progeny at birth must have been shared by most nineteenth-century women, in their ignorance and fear of the birth process. Most powerful of all (and the subject of most of the novel) are his feelings of depression and detachment after the actual birth. Even in our time, postpartum depression remains a misunderstood and often misdiagnosed condition; for Shelley in 1818 to depict the negative consequences of this disease left untreated was a revolutionary act. “The idea that a mother can loathe, fear, and reject her baby has until recently been one of the most repressed of psychological insights,” writes Barbara Johnson in “My Monster/My Self,” another important feminist essay. “What is threatening about [Frankenstein] is the way in which its critique of the role of the mother touches on primitive terrors of the mother’s rejection of the child” (Johnson in Bloom, p. 61) . As a writer who was also a mother (a rare combination in nineteenth-century England, as Johnson points out), Shelley broke down long-standing rules of propriety by retelling the myth of origins from the female point of view.

But Frankenstein is not just a tale of the consequences of giving birth to hideous progeny; it is also concerned with the feelings of guilt, betrayal, and loneliness experienced by the hideous progeny itself. Suffering from an infection brought on when pieces of placenta remained in her uterus, Mary Wollstonecraft died in great pain on September 10, 1797, eleven days after Mary’s birth. The event is described in detail by Godwin in the last chapter of Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “The loss of the world in this admirable woman, I leave to other men to collect; my own I well know, nor can it be improper to describe it,” wrote Godwin toward the end of his highly emotional account. “This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!” Godwin carried a torch for Mary Wollstonecraft the rest of his life: Though he remarried and remained with his second wife for thirty-five years, his wish to be buried with Wollstonecraft was fulfilled upon his death in 1836.

If it was not enough bearing the same name as her celebrated mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was constantly reminded of her maternal heritage by Godwin and his friends. Mary was strongly encouraged to fulfill her literary legacy at an early age; at fifteen, she wrote a satiric poem entitled “Mounseer Nongtongpaw” that Godwin had published. On her birthday, Godwin planned family visits to Wollstonecraft’s grave; one celebration was held among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, as he lectured on great men and women. Visitors to the Godwin household asked Mary to stand beneath John Opie’s portrait of a pregnant Wollstonecraft, and even Mary’s future husband, Percy, was “from the first very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage” (p. 6).