Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Welcome to the MidiCast!

Ta-da! I don't know why I do that. I started doing it, and now I keep doing it.

Okay, well, tradition.

Well, as promised, this is a MidiCast about Mary Godwin Shelley, the daughter of Mary Walsoncraft and the author of, among other things, a work entitled Frankenstein.

Yes.

I'll just make noises in the background.

Yes.

She let it very full light, but so we're just going to kind of bullet point that life in this MidiCast.

So we're going to try and keep it short.

So do just to get a little background if you'd like.

It's not so critical on this one, actually, but go back if you would like and listen to the Mary Walsoncraft podcast.

Mary Walsoncraft is, in fact, her mother.

But, as Mary Walsoncraft died within 10 days of her birth, the link between the two is not as critical as normally it is to a MidiCast subject to the regular subject.

Right.

So you may proceed if you wish.

Certainly, and it's kind of interesting because you say, you know, you always say, oh, Mary Shelley is the daughter of Mary Walsoncraft, but they never knew each other.

So she was the daughter of a famous proto-feminist author Mary Walsoncraft and William Godwin, the radical anarchist philosopher, who had among other things a work entitled Lives of the Necromancers.

So about half a year after Mary Walsoncraft died, her father, Mr. Godwin, married a widow with two children, Mrs. Claremont.

So it was this odd blended family. His daughter, Mary Godwin, are subject, her to children, and then his first wife's child.

So it was a strange blended family, and it was not, I mean, it's unconventional in and of itself, but they were unconventional people.

They were definitely a free-thinking family. Her father is a known atheist and an outward, you know, advocate for atheism at that.

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