ABSTRACT
When Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever on September 10, 1797, she left her newborn daughter with a double burden: a powerful and ever-to-be-frustrated need to be mothered, together with a name, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, that proclaimed this small child as the fruit of the most famous radical literary marriage of eighteenth-century England. Watching the growth of this baby girl into the author of one of the most famous novels ever written, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,we can never forget how much her desperate desire for a loving and supportive parent defined her character, shaped her fantasies, and produced her fictional idealizations of the bourgeois family—idealizations whose very fictiveness, as we shall see, is transparent.
