ABSTRACT
The death of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in childbirth not only deprived Mary Shelley of her mother, but left her with a perhaps never-satisfiable desire for the unconditional love of another person. Further frustrated by the apparent withdrawal of her father's affection, her unhappy interactions with her stepmother, the deaths of four of her five children and her troubled relationship with her husband (who died when she was only twenty-five), Mary Shelley displaced her desire for an all-consoling mother on to the world around her. She turned first to her father, then to “mother nature” (during her two-year stay in Scotland with the Baxter family), then to her husband, her female friends, and finally to an aristocratic “society” for the attention, approval, and financial support she craved.
