We meet her, of course, reading a book while hunched up against a tombstone. This is an instantly evocative image, juxtaposing the freshness of youth with the finality of death to convey a mood (the pleasingly Gothic milieu out of which the famed novel arose), a theme (the haunting presence of death in the young woman's life), and a particular context (the grave belongs to Mary Wollstonecroft, a feminist trailblazer who died giving birth to our heroine). Mary Godwin (Elle Fanning) is not yet Mary Shelley - in fact, incongruous if obvious title aside, she won't be until the film has nearly ended - but we can already see the author of Frankenstein foreshadowed in this imaginative, rebellious young woman, skipping chores to read ghost stories. She races home where she struggles alongside her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley) under the caring but aloof tutelage of her father William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) and her much more malevolently down-to-earth stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont (Joanne Froggatt, just twelve years older than her onscreen daughter Powley). This dreary domestic portrait suggests a quite typical workaday milieu of impoverished English life early in the nineteenth century, but in many ways Mary's life is extremely atypical - her weary father and late mother not only brushed shoulders with titans of the age, but were themselves incendiary radicals.
There's a sense in which this recent past seems both fresh and faded; Mary's mother feels like a ghostly presence that's only just left the room, whose traces can still be sensed in disturbances of the atmosphere - and her still-living father smolders like a candle only just extinguished. But if the curtain has only just fallen on one epoch, it's already opening on another - and Mary herself will play a starring role. She meets, falls in love with, and runs away with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth), disowned even by her liberal-minded father as society both scorns and celebrates the young rebels. She births - and loses - a child, racing from residence to residence as her husband publishes his work and she struggles to find her own voice. Eventually - along with scientific breakthroughs of the time, Mary's grief surrounding her dead baby, and the confusion of her status in this tumultuous world - it will be Claire's fling with (and eventual, agonizing rejection by) Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) that leads Mary to discover this voice at a certain Swiss chateau on a very famous dark and stormy night.
