Wollstonecraft in Love: Mary Shelley

I am not sure how much of the 2017 movie Mary Shelley was historically accurate and I am not sure that I really care. I do know that when I first started watching it, I found myself fearing that the whole movie would turn out to be one long exercise in tiresome Oscar bait specifically made to appease the Merchant and Ivory set. But to my surprise, I found myself caught up in it.

There were times that it seemed a bit soap opera-ish. Indeed, it would have been a bit hard to tell Mary Shelley's real-life story without getting a bit soap opera-ish.

Then again I was a bit surprised to see the affair between Ms. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin -- aka the future Mary Shelley -- and the poet Percy Shelley depicted not so much as a grand romantic tragedy but more as a tragically romantic mistake. Indeed, Percy Shelley came across in the movie as so much of a schmuck that it seemed a wonder that Ms. Wollstonecraft Godwin would end up staying with him. To the movie's credit, it also tried to give equal time to Mary's literary efforts though I suspect that the romance between her and her future husband was the real point of interest for most other audience members.

If I had to pick the movie's biggest flaw, it was that it left so many questions unanswered, the most obvious being the fate of Shelley's daughter from his first marriage -- the one in which he was involved prior to meeting Ms. Wollstonecraft Godwin. The movie had a touching scene midway through the film in which the future Ms. Shelley saw her future husband's current spouse Harriet out walking with the daughter that was conceived in that marriage and thus saw a glimpse of her own future. But alas, Mary did not heed the obvious warning that someday her lover might display the same attitude toward her and her future child that he was currently displaying to Harriet and her child.

For that matter, there was yet another scene in which an old friend of Shelley's decided to make a pass at Mary -- and when Mary told Percy about it, he seemed so fine with it that it seemed a wonder that he did not go on from there to pimp her out.

In the end, Ms. Wollstone Godwin got more sympathy than her future husband and it was hard for me to pretend she did not deserve it. But the lion's share of my sympathy still stayed with Percy's first wife and her daughter -- neither of whom were ever likely to ever become the subject of a Hollywood movie. Oh, well. At least the movie did not pretend that the two of them never existed.