Mary and Percy continued loving each other despite his marrigae with Harriet.They spent eight years together, during which time she gave birth to four kids from five pregnacies. Unfortunately, however, only one child survived to adulthood. Her first daoughter, borned prematurely in 1815, died eleven days after birth; her second child died in 1819 from malaria at three years old; the third died from dysentry one year after birth in 1818. The fourth child survive in to adulthood, however she had a miscarriage on her fifth pregnancy and almost lost her life.
On top of all these tragedies in her life, her half-sister, Fannny Goodwin, and Harriet Shelley, her husband's ex-wife, committed suicide in 1816. With these deaths, and the death of her mother for which she blames herself, she must have been very preocccupied with the idea of death. Some critics, according to brandeis.edu, "pointed out the link between the themes of creation, birth, and death in Frankenstein and Mary Shelley 's real-life preoccupation with pregnancy, labor, maternity, and death."
In record of a dream she had after the death of her first child she wrote that she had a "Dream that my little baby came to life again--that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived." These anxieties she had about motherhood and the inability to give life may have led her to write the tale of Frankenstein, where a scientist succeeded in giving life.
More info at brandeis.edu
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