Mary’s taste was also similar to her mother’s Wollstonecraft refers in letters to the influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which looms large in Frankenstein. She grew up surrounded by her parents’ famous friends, including poet Samuel Coleridge. Her daughter read all of Wollstonecraft’s works several times, according to Gordon, later writing about the pressure she felt to match her mother’s talent. Ahead of its time, the publication still resonates in feminism today. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, was a ground-breaking work that advocated, among other things, the reform of female education and a woman’s right to earn a living. In addition to her gravestone, Wollstonecraft left behind another tangible legacy: her literary works. Godwin disowned his daughter for several years after the elopement, which devastated Mary. Mary referred to July 28, 1814, as the anniversary of their “union,” after which they ran away to Paris together. Scholars like Gordon speculate that the graveyard was also where the couple first consummated their relationship. “Percy was impressed with how brave she was to break all the rules that bound conventional young women,” Gordon says. She was 16 he was 21, and already married. Shelley was an admirer of Mary’s father, and grew close to Mary during his frequent visits to the family house. It was at Wollstonecraft’s grave that the teenage Mary first declared her love for the poet Percy Shelley.

The graveyard became Mary’s private place, where she would often retreat. He would have thought this was an excellent way to teach his daughter about her famous mother,” Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, tells TIME. “ would not have thought this was macabre. In the run-up to Mary’s birth in 1797, Wollstonecraft sent a note to Godwin as she waited for the midwife, eccentrically referring to Mary as their “animal”: And after their marriage, Godwin and Wollstonecraft preferred to live separately during the day and communicate by correspondence, exchanging notes and letters. Her father was a drunk and she had an illegitimate child, a daughter called Fanny Imlay, before marrying Mary’s father, the famous philosopher William Godwin. Wollstonecraft was a radical thinker, vilified for her feminist ideas, and even called a “hyena in petticoats” by one British politician, Horace Walpole. But even in death, Wollstonecraft played a pivotal role in Mary’s life. She did not live to see her daughter grow up to become a writer, dying of septicemia just over a week after giving birth to Mary. Wollstonecraft was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of the famous horror story, published 200 years ago this year, about a monster brought to life by maverick scientist Victor Frankenstein.

Wollstonecraft by Mary Wollstonecraft