A mother often has influence on her offspring, even when she never lives to watch them grow up. Such was the case with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

We can see the irreligious and/or blasphemous nature of Mary Shelley's early life, which also became a statement on sexual freedom. On this page, we're exploring what influence her mother's writing and actions could have had on Mary.

There's possibly a large influence given the following circumstances of Mary Wollstonecraft's life and the fact that Mary read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of her mother's books, on her return to London along the Rhine with Percy as she was finishing Frankenstein (Mellor, 27).

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First, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had a scandalous affair with painter Henry Fuseli sometime between 1788 and 1790. Mary Shelley learned of this through her father's book Memoirs of the Life of the Author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Memoirs was meant to be a "loving celebration" but was met with disgusted reviews and sentiments of shock by men such as Charles Lucas and Thomas Mathias as well as writers of the Monthly Review (Mellor, 2-3).

Secondly, within these memoirs, was Mary Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts. To take one's life in vain is highly irreligious and, again according to Anne Mellor, was more highly reacted to by readers than the acts of adultery she committed and sought after. Fanny Imlay, Shelley's half sister, was born out of wedlock five years previous to Wollstonecraft's marriage to William. Then, Wollstonecraft proposed to be a celibate third in a menage a trios with Fuseli and his new bride Sophia after her affair with him at the end of the 1780's (Mellor, 2).

Mary Wollstonecraft did not leave a religious legacy for her daughter but in fact, due to William willingly publishing her memoirs and Wollstonecraft having been, and remaining, such a visible figure because of her own infamous revolutionary writings, she left Shelley in a setting that echoed how her mother was a woman of debauchery and immorality.

Immoral is defined as "contrary to established moral principles" (Dictionary.com) which supports my point that these women were challengers to both religious ideas and proponents of sexual freedom! BUT, it was this woman Mary Shelley came to respect most.