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emotions, that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy—and
     shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.
    When she returned, she found Imlay was now openly living with another woman. Mary’s humiliation was now both complete and
     public. She again sought escape through suicide—this time with more determination. She wrote to Imlay, “I would encounter
     a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last. I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my
     being snatched from the death I seek.” On a rainy afternoon in October 1795, Mary carried out her plan. She rented a boat
     and rowed herself up the Thames to the Putney Bridge, which she had learned was less crowded than Battersea Bridge, the closest
     span to her flat. Leaving the boat, she walked back and forth along the bridge in the pouring rain to make sure that her clothes
     were so wet that she would sink under the waters. As she threw herself into the dark cold river, she expected death to embrace
     her kindly, the way Goethe had described it in
The Sorrows of Young Werther:
“I do not shudder to take the cold and fatal cup.” (
Werther
was a bestseller that had prompted many suicides throughout Europe and was later to be one of the books that the monster
     reads in
Frankenstein
.) But as water filled Mary’s lungs, she began to choke and was in pain before losing consciousness. A man who had seen her
     leap off the bridge jumped in and saved her. He took her to a tavern, where a doctor revived her. Death, apparently, would
     not accept her sacrifice.
    Imlay offered financial help but Mary was too proud to accept it. She saw Imlay for the last time in 1796 and wrote to him
     the next day, “I part with you in peace.” She resumed her writing career to earn her keep and get on with her life. From the
     Scandinavian trip came a charming book,
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The act of writing it gave her some respite from the turmoil that raged within her, and she began to come to grips with Imlay’s
     true character, realizing that the relationship could never have worked out the way she had wanted. Perhaps most importantly,
Letters
won the heart of William Godwin, whom Mary would meet a second time, with happier results than the first.
    W
illiam Godwin described himself accurately as “bold and adventurous in opinions, not in life.” Though not as well known today
     as he once was, Godwin was one of the most important radical thinkers of his time. His courage did not extend to his relations
     with women, and it was only after becoming involved with Mary that he explored the intricacies of love. Their short life together
     provided for each of them the emotional and intellectual companionship that they had lacked. For their daughter Mary Shelley,
     who never knew her mother, their mutual affection was an ideal that continually inspired her fiction and her own desires.
    Godwin was born March 3, 1756, in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire Fens—a bleak area where the North Sea constantly threatens
     to overwhelm the land. He was the son and grandson of clergymen—so-called Dissenters who were stricter in their beliefs than
     the members of the Church of England. This devout religious background created an emotional rigidity that made William more
     comfortable with books than with the love and affection of other people. It fostered his shyness and coldness and did long-term
     psychological damage that he would pass on to his daughter.
    William was the seventh of thirteen children, many of whom did not survive to adulthood. His father, John Godwin, was the
     minister of the Wisbech Independent Chapel and took in paying pupils to supplement his meager income. Because of the large
     family, William got little attention even as a young child. He was sent to a wet nurse for the first two years of his life
     and later, like Mary Wollstonecraft, was to fault his