Birth, Death, and Illegitimacy  

1797	Mary Wollstonecraft dies ten days after giving birth to daughter.
July 1814	Mary Godwin (Shelley) runs away with Percy Shelley. She is 16 and pregnant. Godwin refuses to communicate with her.
November	Harriet Shelley (PS's wife) gives birth "to a son and possible heir."
February 1815	Birth of a daughter:  illegitimate, premature, and sickly.
March	Baby dies.
April	Pregnant again.
January 1816	Birth of a son.
March	Claire Clairmont (younger step-sister) pregnant by Byron.
June	Begins writing Frankenstein.
October	Fanny Imlay (older half-sister), commits suicide after discovering she is not Godwin's daughter but Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter by an American lover. Godwin refused to claim body, which is thrown into a pauper's grave.
December (early)	Pregnant again. Completes chapter 4.
December (middle)	Harriet Shelley drowns herself in the Serpentine; she is pregnant by someone other than Shelley.
December (late)	Marries P. Shelley.
January 1817	Claire Clairmont gives birth to daughter.
May	Finishes Frankenstein.

Note that Walton and his sister are orphans, as is Frankenstein's fiancé, Elizabeth. The first of the monster's murder victims, Frankenstein's infant brother is precisely drawn, even to his name, after Mary Shelley's baby. There is also Justine, the innocent young girl wrongly executed for the infant's murder, who is also a victim of what M.S. calls that "strange perversity," a mother's hatred. And finally, there is the creature: created without a mother, a perverse kind of illegitimacy.

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