[4] While denying herself gowns and wine-glasses Mary was, however, generously assisting her father, brothers and sisters. MARY W. GODWIN (SHELLEY). 1797-1851. MARY W. GODWIN (SHELLEY). Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on the 30th of August, 1797. “Two angels, one of Life and one of Death,” together entered the door of William Godwin. Long after, Shelley wrote: “They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents thou aspiring child: I wonder not--for One then left this earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild, Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory.” A spirit akin to that of Greek tragedy informs the double story of mother and daughter. Mary Godwin inherited her fate. The peculiar reverence in which she must necessarily have held the mother who had died to give her life, the implicit confidence with which she must have received that mother’s doctrines, as set forth in her life and preserved in her books,--this was the strongest determining influence in the life of the girl, Mary Godwin. When, at the age of seventeen, she unhesitatingly plighted her faith to a man already bound by the laws of society to another, there is significance in the fact that their hands were clasped over her mother’s grave--the spot which a woman of opposite traditions must have shunned with shame at such a moment. That sacred place seemed fittest for the strange betrothal of Mary Godwin, who had no doubt that the mother who there slept would have smiled upon the lovers. Censure of this step has properly no place in a sketch of Mary Godwin Shelley; the entire responsibility rests with Shelley and her parents; her action was simply an inevitable result. From July 28, 1814, till the fatal 8th of the same month in 1822, her life was one with Shelley’s. Immeasurably greater as he was, we may yet claim for his wife that she influenced his genius in one respect and in one instance: it was her persuasion that led him, in ‘The Cenci,’ closer to realities, and she regarded that work as a promise of the warmer grasp of human interests on his part that might at last “touch the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen.” She was formally married to Shelley in 1816, on the death of Harriet Shelley. Robbed of her husband by death in 1822, Mary returned to London in the following year for the sake of Percy, her only surviving child. Her own wishes would have led her to remain in Italy. For some time she resided with her father, but subsequently removed to Kentish Town, and then to Harrow, that she might be near her boy at school.