![]() ![]() ![]() A constant stream of intellectuals visited her home including the writers Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as scientists, doctors, politicians, philosophers and actors. Mary’s father and stepmother ran a publishing firm for children’s books and though Mary did not have a formal education, she was a voracious reader in a home filled with books. ![]() In all, there were five children in the Godwin home, none with the same two parents. Mary Godwin also had an older half-sister named Fanny, a child of her mother’s relationship with another man. She and William Godwin had a son, William, in 1803. ![]() Her father remarried in 1801 and Mary, who revered the memory of her mother, never got along with her stepmother, Mary Clairmont. Mary Godwin’s father, William Godwin, was also a philosophical thinker, and wrote Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: And Its Influences on Morals and Happiness, a book which argued against the institutions of government and marriage. Mary Godwin never knew her mother who died 11 days after giving birth to her. In it, she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, and that men and women should be treated as rational beings, proposing a social order founded on reason. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Mary Shelley) was born on Augin London. ![]()
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