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Throughout
her life, and especially in her childhood, Mary Shelley was
surrounded by great intellectuals and scholars. She incorporated
many theories and notions of radical progressives into Frankenstein,
namely Rousseau and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, enhancing
the value of the story and creating it into a hidden masterpiece.
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Books
which characters read in the novel include The Bible,
comte de Volney's Ruins of the Empires, Goethe's The
Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost, and
Parcelsus' Alchemistry.
Although Mary Shelley never had a formal education, she spent
the majority of her time reading and studying on her own. In
her journal entries, she religiously kept noted what she read
everyday or what she and Percy Shelley read together. On Tuesday
March 21, 1815 she wrote, "Talk,
and then read Gibbon. Shelley reads Livy, and then reads Gibbon
with me till dinner. After dinner play at chess and read. Peacock
comes to tea. Work. After he goes away I read Gibbon (p. 275),
and Shelley reads Livy (p. 406)." These entries
changed from day to day, interchanging reading with taking a
walk, traveling, or engaging in mealtime conversations with
visitors.
Indicated in her journal entries between 1814-1828, Mary Shelley
read enormous amount of literature including Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
John Milton, Plutarch, William Shakespeare, Homer, John Keats,
and Thomas Moore. Amazingly, she read many of these works before
she was seventeen, when she wrote Frankenstein.
It
was not unusual that Mary Shelley did not receive a formal
education. However, it no small accomplishment that she studied
and read all of these authors so feverishly. Her self-education
makes her a sort of "self-made woman." After reading
the ideas and works of all of these great authors, primarily
men, Mary then formulated her own theories and notions. It
is significant to note that the only woman whose work Mary
read was her own mother's, Mary Wollstonecraft. This shows
how unusual it was for a woman to publish a work and to be
well-educated.
Mary
Shelley's self-education allowed her to be the creator of
an intensely intellectual literary and historical masterpiece,
the 1817 Frankenstein.
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