Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797 in Somers Town, London; both her parents were philosophers. When she was 16, she fell in love with 21-year-old radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was already married, having run away to Edinburgh in 1811 to marry the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook (despite his erstwhile criticism of the practice generally). In 1814 he remarried Harriet in England, in order to quell any question about the legality of the marriage in Scotland. But less than two months later, Shelley had met and fallen in love with Mary, the daughter of one of his heroes, William Godwin (1756-1836). In June they declared their love for each other at the grave of Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist writer, who had died 11 days after Mary’s birth. (“Declaring their love”, it’s been rumored, went beyond verbal expression). And within weeks, the two took off for Europe, along with Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont. Mary and Percy returned to England in September 1816. Three months later, Percy’s wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine, the 40-acre lake in Hyde Park, London. Less than three weeks after that, in late December 1816, Mary and Percy married.
During that summer of 1816, Percy, Mary and Claire had met up with Lord Byron in a lakeside house in Geneva. During that sojourn, Claire became pregnant by Lord. . . oh, never mind. The company, in that “Year Without a Summer”, amused themselves by reading aloud from “Fantasmagoriana”, a French anthology of German horror stories. Byron suggested they write their own, and, inspired by discussions of “galvanism” (creating muscular convulsions by application of electricity), Mary began on the story that would become the novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”, published in 1818. Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori (1795-1821) was there, too, and he wrote a story about a vampire, called “The Vampyre” (1819). Many assumed Byron had written it, and although he did not, he did serve as a model for the “vampire”, Lord Ruthven. The story is considered the progenitor of all later vampire stories in English. (Polidori, depressed and besieged by gambling debts, died, apparently by suicide, aged 25).
After Percy in 1822 drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia, aged 29, his body was burned in a pyre on the beach. Byron and Shelley hanger-on Edward Trelawney plucked Shelley’s heart from the flames.
Mary Shelley died in 1851 at the age of 53. Although she is often said to have died from a brain tumor, one recent "reassessment of [her] pathobiography" concluded that she died following a series of strokes, culminating in a final massive stroke. Those cerebrovascular events probably originated in a dermatological condition (eczema, psoriasis, or chickenpox) she had first suffered when she was 14, which condition initially manifested as extreme pain in one whole arm. Such dermatological conditions can produce long-term severe headache symptoms and worse: Shelley, for at least 12 years, endured migraines characterized by weakness, intermittent aphasia, partial paralysis, and convulsive seizures.
One year after her death, her family opened her box-desk. There was a copy of her husband’s elegy for John Keats (1795-1821), the poem “Adonais”. One page was folded around a folded silk parcel, and inside that envelope were the desiccated remains of Percy's heart.
(Mary Shelley (1840) by Richard Rothwell (1800-1868).