Aspiring Child

These 100 sonnets tell the story of an extraordinary young woman who had an immeasurable impact on literature and other media worldwide. The collection focuses on the period from her birth, as Mary Godwin (daughter of literary firebrands William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), to her twenty-fourth year, when she returned to London after five years abroad: a widow and a mother to a young son, but with a scandalous reputation and no clear means of support. However, she was "The Author of 'Frankenstein'." The nom de plume carried the weight of a novel that had already become famous (indeed, infamous), and she understood that it may make it possible for her to support herself and her son via her pen. The sonnets also chronicle Mary Shelley's interactions with some of the most influential writers and thinkers of her day: her husband Percy Shelley, of course, as well as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew "Monk" Lewis, John Polidori, Leigh Hunt, and others. And no biography of Mary Shelley would be complete without an accounting of the famous ghost story writing contest among the "Diodoti Circle" in the year with no summer. Several of the sonnets appeared in journals previously, including Feminist Spaces, The Poetry Lighthouse, The Soliloquist, and The Brussels Review.