One of the most difficult aspects of Mary Shelley's life is the frequent death that seems to follow her. The main character Victor Frankenstein is faced with the loss of his younger brother, William, the accused, Justine Moritz, his best friend, Henry Clerval, and his wife, Elizabeth Lavenza. Like Victor, Mary loses her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, her first daughter, her half-sister, Fanny Imlay Godwin, her daughter, Clara, and her son, William. She is also fascinated with graveyards, specifically the site of her mother's grave at Saint Pancras Churchyard, "where she read her mother's works and sought solace from nature and her mother's spirit" (Mellor 20). In the novel, Victor spent a lot of his time in graveyards conducting research, "I was led to examine the cause and progress of th

is decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses" (Shelley 36-37).

Mary Shelley had a great passion for literature and read the same pieces as her monster. In Frankenstein, the monster benefits from several writings, "Goethe's Werther, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Romans, Volney's Ruins or,...the Revolutions of Empire, and Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as the poets the creature occasionally quotes (Mellor 45). Mary's love for the romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron is aesthetically incorporated into her novel. Her respect for the beauty of the earth is shown through her vivid descriptions of the scenery and Henry Clerval's optimism in chapter eighteen.

From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures, and cultivated the acquaintance, of the men of science of the university. (35)

Mary's many relocations and exotic excursions with her husband, Percy and sister, Claire Clairmont contributed to the excessive travels of Victor Frankenstein in the novel. According to Leonard Wolf, in The Annotated Frankenstein, almost every location mentioned in the book pertains to a place she has visited. For example, C

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Approximate Word count = 949
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)