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50 free Mary Shelley trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Mary Shelley trivia quiz is about the woman rather than the monster: the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin who eloped with a married poet at sixteen, wrote Frankenstein at nineteen and outlived almost everyone she loved. The easy questions cover the famous novel, the parents, the poet husband, the ghost-story contest at Byron's villa and the summer of 1816. From there it moves through the life: the secret meetings at her mother's grave, the elopement with her stepsister in tow, the lost babies, the two suicides of 1816, the anonymous first edition everyone assumed Percy had written, the Naples mystery, and the storm off Viareggio. The harder end covers the astronomer who dated her 'waking dream' to the small hours of 16 June, the £60 she got for the 1831 copyright, the false passports she obtained for two women, the proposal from an American actor, the blackmailers of 1845, the brain tumour, and what her son found in her desk a year after she died. Every answer was checked against Shelley's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. For the novel itself, our Frankenstein quiz is the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two radical writers were the future author of Frankenstein's parents?
Wollstonecraft and Godwin
Her mother wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; her father was the anarchist philosopher of Political Justice.
Q 02How soon after Mary's birth did her mother die?
11 days
The cause was puerperal fever; Godwin's frank memoir of his wife the next year scandalised readers.
Q 03In which part of London was Mary born in 1797?
Somers Town
She would later lodge there again with Percy after their elopement.
Q 04Whom did William Godwin marry in 1801, giving his daughter a stepmother she 'came to detest'?
Mrs Clairmont, a widowed neighbour
Godwin's friends thought her quick-tempered, but the marriage was a success; her daughter Claire became Mary's stepsister.
Q 05Which two famous visitors to her father's house did the young Mary have access to?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Aaron Burr
Godwin gave her a governess, a daily tutor and the run of his library.
Q 06To which Scottish city was Mary sent in 1812 to stay with the radical Baxter family?
Dundee
Godwin wanted her 'brought up like a philosopher, even like a cynic'; she said her true compositions were born there.
Q 07Where did Mary and Percy Shelley meet secretly and declare their love in 1814?
At her mother's grave in St Pancras churchyard
She was 16 and he was 21, and already married.
Q 08Whom did the eloping couple take with them to France on 28 July 1814?
Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont
Claire's mother chased them to Calais but failed to bring them home.
Q 09How did the trio travel through war-ravaged France to Switzerland in 1814?
By donkey, mule, carriage and foot
Lack of money forced them to turn back at Lucerne; they were home in Kent by 13 September.
Q 10How premature was the baby girl Mary gave birth to in February 1815, who died days later?
Two months
She wrote to Hogg 'I am no longer a mother now', and was haunted by visions of the child.
Q 11What was the nickname of Mary's son William, born in January 1816?
Willmouse
He was named after her father; he died of malaria in Rome in 1819.
Q 12What was the Lake Geneva house Byron rented in 1816, site of the ghost-story contest, called?
Villa Diodati
The Shelleys rented the smaller Maison Chapouis nearby on the waterfront.
Q 13Who was the young physician who accompanied Byron to Geneva in 1816?
John William Polidori
His own contribution to the contest became The Vampyre.
How did Mary later describe the weather during those weeks of 1816?
Q 21Where was Percy Shelley's first wife Harriet found drowned in December 1816?
The Serpentine in Hyde Park
His lawyers advised him to marry Mary to strengthen his custody claim; they wed on 30 December.
Q 22At which London church did Mary and Percy marry on 30 December 1816?
St Mildred's, Bread Street
Godwin, who had cut her off, gave consent and signed the register, ending the family rift.
Q 23What did the Chancery Court rule in March 1817 about Percy Shelley and his children by Harriet?
He was morally unfit to have custody
'A wet, ungenial summer'
Rain kept the party indoors, where German ghost stories led Byron to propose that each write their own.
Q 15What scientific idea discussed at Diodati fed Mary's 'waking dream' of a reanimated corpse?
Galvanism
'Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated,' she noted; 'galvanism had given token of such things.'
Q 16To what time did astronomer Donald Olson date Mary's waking dream, using moon and star data?
Between 2am and 3am on 16 June 1816
He published the finding in 2011 after visiting the villa.
Q 17On what date was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first published?
1 January 1818
It appeared anonymously with a preface by Percy and a dedication to Godwin, so readers assumed Percy wrote it.
Q 18Why did early readers assume Percy Shelley had written Frankenstein?
It was anonymous, with his preface and a dedication to Godwin
Charles E. Robinson later concluded Percy's edits were no more than any publisher's editor would make.
Q 19Which library holds the Frankenstein notebooks that show Percy's corrections?
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
Fiona Sampson examined them and found Percy 'did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today'.
Q 20How did Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay die in October 1816?
Suicide by laudanum at a Swansea inn
Two months later Percy's wife Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine; both deaths were hushed up.
The children were placed with a clergyman's family.
Q 24What was the name of Claire Clairmont's daughter by Byron, born in January 1817?
Allegra
First called Alba, she was handed over to Byron in Venice and died of typhus in a convent aged five.
Q 25Which travel book, edited by Mary from the couple's joint journal, appeared in November 1817?
History of a Six Weeks' Tour
It included Percy's poem 'Mont Blanc'.
Q 26Which two of Mary's children died in Italy in 1818 and 1819?
Clara and William
Clara died in Venice and William of malaria in Rome, leaving her 'childless and forever miserable' until Percy Florence's birth.
Q 27What was the name of Mary's only child to survive to adulthood?
Percy Florence Shelley
Born in November 1819, he went to Harrow and Cambridge but 'showed no sign of his parents' gifts'.
Q 28Which novella about a father's incestuous love for his daughter did Mary write in Italy to cope with grief?
Matilda
It began as The Fields of Fancy; she also wrote the plays Proserpine and Midas there.
Q 29In which Italian city did Percy Shelley register a mystery baby, Elena Adelaide, as his child by Mary?
Naples
Mary later called Naples 'a paradise inhabited by devils'; the one certainty is that she was not the mother.
Q 30How did Percy save Mary's life when she miscarried at Villa Magni in June 1822?
He sat her in a bath of ice
The doctor later told him the ice stanched the bleeding and saved her.