 Certain sections of Mary Shelley 's novels are often interpreted as masked rewritings of her life . Critics have pointed to the recurrence of the father – daughter motif in particular as evidence of this autobiographical style . For example , commentators frequently read Mathilda ( 1820 ) autobiographically , identifying the three central characters as versions of Mary Shelley , William Godwin , and Percy Shelley . Mary Shelley herself confided that she modelled the central characters of The Last Man on her Italian circle . Lord Raymond , who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople , is based on Lord Byron ; and the utopian Adrian , Earl of Windsor , who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm , is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley . However , as she wrote in her review of Godwin 's novel Cloudesley ( 1830 ) , she did not believe that authors " were merely copying from our own hearts " . William Godwin regarded his daughter 's characters as types rather than portraits from real life . Some modern critics , such as Patricia <unk> and Jane Blumberg , have taken the same view , resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley 's works . 
