worthy of my parentage
However odd this may sound to contemporary ears, it is certainly true that
Percy Bysshe Shelley deeply
romanticized Mary's origins,
seeing her as singled out by her birth for great literary accomplishment.
He pays tribute to her in these terms in his Dedication to The Revolt of
Islam, the epic-romance he wrote simultaneously with her
composition of Frankenstein. Although some commentators have seen
the pressures to write to which her lover/husband subjected Mary Shelley
as pernicious, it did not originate with him so much as in the milieu in
which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was raised. There, writing (William Godwin) and publishing (Mary Jane Clairmont, his second wife)
was what one did.
