As legend has it: In May of 1916, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his not-wife Mary Shelley went to Geneva. Along for the ride (for months and years) was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Shelley had a fantasy of living in a collective type of group marriage, and Mary agreed, in a way, but was not happy about the omnipresent Claire, with whom she did not get along. Nevertheless, the trio went to spend the summer with the notorious Lord Byron. Shelley and Mary were a scandalous pair: after all, Shelley was still married, and he and Mary literally ran off together without getting hitched. But Lord Byron was famous, as in FAMOUS famous, whereas Shelley was – if not well-known, then at least not AS well-known as Byron. Byron was an absolute SCANDAL. Shelley, Mary and Claire were also scandalous, traveling around Europe together. Meanwhile, Claire got pregnant by Lord Byron, and really fell apart because of it. Byron wouldn’t acknowledge the child, until he did, and he took the child away and put her into a convent. I mean, I could go on. It’s endlessly fascinating.
So. Onto the legend. The legend of the birth of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley wasn’t just some amoeba who had no ambition until that one stormy night of inspiration. She had ambition. She was extremely well read. She had already written a book about her travels through war-torn Europe. She was the daughter of two very famous parents, atheist/revolutionary book publisher William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist revolutionary who died giving birth to Mary. Mary Shelley was the nepo-est of nepo babies.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley was actually one of Godwin’s acolytes, before he knew Mary, drawn to Godwin for his radical ideas. Which was all well and good but the constantly cash-poor Godwin hoped Shelley would support him financially. Godwin somehow got it into his head Shelley would pay all his debts. Forever? It seems weird. Shelley came from wealth, of course – although I don’t even know what that means in this case, English aristocracy being what it is – but he wasn’t some famous guy who tossed money around. Meanwhile: Shelley met Godwin’s daughter, Mary, and before you know it, he was courting her – while standing at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s mother. You can’t make this up. Shelley was married, too! His wife Harriet was pregnant! But he ran away with Mary anyway. Mary was 17.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Of course her father was scandalized, but his reaction was tempered by the fact that he also thought Shelley should pay his debts, because Shelley had promised (did he, though?) he would. So it was weird. Also, Mary’s attitude was like: “Seriously, dad, why are you scandalized? You and my mother were radical, you and my mother didn’t believe in marriage, and I don’t either. You taught me well, right?”
At any rate, Shelley and Mary (and poor hang-along Claire) ran away to Europe together. Rumors swirled around them. The most depraved stuff. In 1816, as mentioned, they traveled to Geneva to meet up with Lord Byron. The intervening centuries have blurred some of the specifics: it seems like Shelley must have been famous, but he really wasn’t. He was more famous for his scandals than for his poetry (at that time). Byron, on the other hand, was famous, as famous for his poetry as for his self-inventing fiery mercurial personality. Mary and Shelley were eager to get close to this celebrated man. Claire got too close. And paid the price.
Mary loved the summer at Lake Geneva. There was a lot of just hanging around, and reading, and reading out loud, nights by the fire. The group was simpatico, and fascinated by the same things. They were all radical, politically, and they were all interested in things like science and the new technologies, and what it all might mean. They would stay up at night talking about these things, the philosophies around change, the dangers of unfettered science. On one stormy night, Lord Byron had an idea: they should all write a ghost story, to be shared with the group. Mary was stuck. She couldn’t think of anything. It’s like maybe somewhere she knew that what she was going to write was going to be HUGE and she had to get ready for it. All of the conversations they’d had that summer swirled through her mind. She didn’t know why she couldn’t get started on writing. Every morning, everyone would ask her, “Have you written a story yet?”
In her famous preface to the re-issue of Frankenstein, she described the genesis, the “a-ha” moment of getting The Idea.
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Craetor of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.
I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still: the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story – my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! Oh! If I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frighttened that night!
Swiftly as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.
Frankenstein was just the first book. She made it into the history books on the first try. There are other books (some of which I have read, others not). Much of her personal life, her anxieties, her depression, her life with Shelley, her pains and grief are in her books. Shelley died young. Mary Shelley spent the rest of her life organizing his papers and publishing full editions of his work. It was her life’s mission to get his work out into the world, to solidify his reputation. It worked.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was just 19 years old when she wrote Frankenstein.
The mind boggles.
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