The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, the wife of Shelley:
here, surely, is eminence by position, for those who care for the
progress of humanity and the intellectual development of the race.
Whether this combination conferred eminence on the daughter and wife
as an individual is what we have to enquire. Born as she was at a time
of great social and political disturbance, the child, by inheritance,
of the great French Revolution, and suffering, as soon as born, a loss
certainly in her case the greatest of all, that of her noble-minded
mother, we can imagine the kind of education this young being passed
through--with the abstracted and anxious philosopher-father, with the
respectable but shallow-minded step-mother provided by Godwin to guard
the young children he so suddenly found himself called upon to care
for, Mary and two half-sisters about her own age. How the volumes of
philosophic writings, too subtle for her childish experience, would be
pored over; how the writings of the mother whose loving care she never
knew, whose sad experiences and advice she never heard, would be read
and re-read. We can imagine how these writings, and the discourses she
doubtless frequently heard, as a child, between her father and his
friends, must have impressed Mary more forcibly than the respectable
precepts laid down in a weak way for her guidance; how all this
prepared her to admire what was noble and advanced in idea, without
giving her the ballast needful for acting in the fittest way when a
time of temptation came, when Shelley appeared. He appeared as the
devoted admirer of her father and his philosophy, and as such was
admitted into the family intimacy of three inexperienced girls.

Picture these four young imaginative beings together; Shelley,
half-crazed between youthful imagination and vague ideas of