ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley's idealization of the bourgeois family was both intensified and threatened by her personal experiences as a wife and mother in the years following the publication of Frankenstein in March, 1818. She soon lost a second child. The daughter whom she had carried while writing her novel, Clara Everina, died on September 24, 1818. Less than a year later, on June 7, 1819, her only surviving and favorite child, William, died of malaria in Rome. In part justly, Mary Shelley blamed her husband for the deaths of both these children.
