Mary responded to these pressures with enthusiasm and great aspirations, reading her mother’s works over and over and even “com muning” with her at Wollstonecraft’s gravesite in St. Pancras churchyard. “The memory of my Mother has always been the pride & delight of my life; & the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness I have enjoyed,” Mary wrote in 1827. “Her greatness of soul & my father[‘s] high talents have perpetually reminded me that I ought to degenerate as little as I could from those from whom I derived my being” (Letters, vol. 2, pp. 3-4).

Frankenstein, then, can be read as Mary’s attempt to fulfill her intellectual inheritance from Wollstonecraft. In order for mother to live on through daughter, daughter must produce a work that meets the spectacular standards of Wollstonecraft’s biggest supporters, herself, and the grieving love of her life, her father. The work must also compensate for Mary’s horrific crime: the murder of her namesake. Mary probably wished that she, like Victor, might find out how to bestow life on dead things; she must have also suffered from nightmares like his vision of “the corpse of my dead mother … I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel” (pp. 51-52). Shelley’s overwhelming sense of guilt over her mother’s death made her feel like a fiend. Indeed, if we look beyond the protective, shroud-like narratives of Robert Walton and Frankenstein to the heart of the novel, we hear Mary speaking through the voice of the monster. Like Mary, it is born into a dysfunctional family with one parent missing; it desperately craves the attention and affection of the remaining parent; and ultimately it is responsible for the death of the one who gave it life. “I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin,” the monster wails, looking at the dead body of his creator. “You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself” (p. 196). The monster—and Mary‘s—punishment for this murder is life itself, and the constant realization that they will never live up to parental expectations.

Godwin’s undying love for his wife, along with his demands on Mary to prove herself worthy of her namesake, also engendered a complex and problematic father-daughter relationship. Shelley admitted to her “excessive & romantic attachment to my Father” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 215)—the result of the projection of Godwin’s love for Mary Senior onto Mary Junior, perhaps, or Mary’s willing assumption of her mother’s role in the family. The incest theme was a new and provocative ingredient in many of the Gothic novels Mary enjoyed, which may help explain why she herself included so many incestuous relationships in her works; nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid recognizing autobiographical elements of the passionate father-daughter relationship in Mathilda (1819) or the May-December romance of Caroline Beaufort and her guardian, Alphonse Frankenstein. Love for a father was declared “the first and the most religious tie” in Valperga, (vol. 1, p. 199); Ethel Lodore’s “earliest feeling was love of her father” (Lodore, vol. 1, p. 30). And in Frankenstein, the creature’s sexually suggestive warning “I will be with you on your wedding-night” comes true: The monster enters the honeymoon suite and leaves Elizabeth “lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed” (p. 173). In obliterating the object of Frankenstein’s affection, the monster may be acting out Mary’s own jealous feelings toward her stepmother.

Shelley’s extremely close ties with her parents were felt by her even to her death, when she was buried beside them as she had requested. But the inscription on her gravestone—“Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Daughter of Wilm & Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Widow of the late Percy Shelley”—indicates that there were three major influences on her life and work.