Relations: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Abstract

The pun on ‘relations’ (relations as family, relations as stories) is ours rather than theirs, but it does illuminate important features of the narratives written by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and their daughter Mary.¹ We have already seen that this is true of Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, Caleb Williams (1794). It is equally though differently true of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1797) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modem Prometheus (1818). Maria and Frankenstein, like Caleb Williams, foreground storytelling — mainly autobiographical storytelling — as a central feature of human relationships and one which has, or aspires to have, illocutionary force. These are novels about ‘how to do things with stories’. They are also novels which, like Caleb Williams, explore family relationships, though their understanding of ‘family’ is closer to our own than to Godwin’s, referring to those who are linked, like these three writers themselves, by marriage or by close ties of kinship.