Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley is best known today as the author of Frankenstein, a Gothic novel widely considered the first work of science fiction. As demonstrated by her Swiss sojourn with the married Percy Shelley and the scandalous Lord Byron, Mary's own life was as sensational and tragic as anything contained within the pages of her famous novel. A real-life Gothic heroine and a serious author, her work profoundly influenced English genre fiction, and continues to inspire writers to this day. But to what extent was Mary Shelley’s work influenced by the revolutionary politics and philosophies of her parents? What rash decisions and traumatic events shaped her work? And how does a scary story written almost two centuries ago continue to enthral readers and inspire writers and filmmakers today? This is a Short History Of Mary Shelley A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Professor Fiona Sampson, a prize-winning poet and author of three literary biographies of Romantic women writers, including In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein. Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact Check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  It is June 1816, an unseasonably cold and misty evening in the Swiss Alps.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Rain lashes the windows of the Villa di Odati, an elegant whitewashed mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva. Though the sun has not yet set, the sky is overcast. Thanks to a massive volcanic eruption last year thousands of miles away, much of Europe seems trapped in a permanent dusk.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Inside the villa, the drawing room is illuminated by a fire that spits and crackles in the grate, casting jagged shadows. A small group sits, huddled together on either side of the hearth. On one damask-covered sofa sits a young couple holding hands: Mary, in her late teens, with large eyes and auburn curls, and her lover, the romantic poet Percy Shelley.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Sitting opposite are two men: a doctor, John Polidori, and his patient, the pale, dark-haired Lord Byron, another poet and of much greater repute than Percy.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Mary watches as Byron opens the cheaply-bound volume of ghost stories in his lap. The page is crinkling as he finds his place. Clearing his throat, he begins to read aloud. It is a bone-chilling tale of a man who embraces his new bride on their wedding day, only to find himself holding the skeletal ghost of the woman he had previously spared.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  As the tale reaches its conclusion, something scratches against the window. Mary lets out a small gasp of fright, gripping Percy's hand tightly before the sound is identified: just an overgrown branch knocking against the glass. She shakes her head at her own suggestiveness, but Byron is beaming. Closing the book with a snap, he leans forward excitedly and shares his idea: "What if each of their little group were to write a ghost story of their own?" Percy and Polidori are immediately enamored at the idea, but Mary is silent. For the moment, she is at a loss for an idea.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Eventually, Mary and Percy make their farewells. Creaking, the front door open, they dash out into the driving rain, hand in hand, careening down the path to the much smaller neighboring house where they are staying. They do not stop running until they are safely inside their own bedroom, panting, the door shut tight against the dismal night and its imagined terrors. Hurriedly pulling on her nightgown, Mary slips between the cool sheets. But sleep eludes her, as the gale intensifies outside and images of ghosts and undead corpses spring unbidden to her mind. Suddenly, a clap of thunder rings out, and she screws her eyes shut in fright.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Then, as though projected onto her closed eyelids, it comes to her: the ghost of an idea. A tale about a student of the latest scientific arts who goes beyond the bounds of nature, reanimates a corpse, and creates a monster.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Mary Shelley is best known today as the author of Frankenstein, a Gothic novel widely considered the first work of science fiction. A genre-defining work, Mary was astonishingly young when she wrote it, at a mere 18 years old.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  As demonstrated by her Swiss sojourn with the married Percy Shelley and the scandalous Lord Byron, Mary's own life was as sensational and tragic as anything contained within the pages of her famous novel. A real-life Gothic heroine and a serious author, her work profoundly influenced English genre fiction and continues to inspire writers to this day.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  But to what extent was Mary Shelley's work influenced by the revolutionary politics and philosophies of her parents? What rash decisions and traumatic events shaped her work? And how does a scary story, written almost two centuries ago, continue to enthral readers and inspire writers and filmmakers today?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Mary Shelley.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  The child who will later become the extraordinary Mary Shelley begins life as the daughter of two equally extraordinary parents.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Her mother, Mary Wolstencraft, is an English philosopher and educationalist. In 1790, she writes a pro-Republican treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This is followed, two years later, by her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy and a powerful argument for access to education for women and girls.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  In 1792, Wolstencraft puts her ideological principles into practice. Alone, she heads into revolutionary France, the dangerous heart of radical European politics. There, she writes a history of the revolution and falls in love with an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlee. They have a daughter out of wedlock, named Fanny. But when the child is still an infant, Imlee abandons them. Distraught, Wolstencraft returns to England, where she is reintroduced to another political radical, a former minister named William Godwin. Both fiercely opinionated, their initial meeting a few years previously

• 7:22Speaker 02

  ended in something of an argument. This time, things go rather better, and they soon fall in love.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Professor Fiona Sampson is a prize-winning poet and author of three literary biographies of romantic women writers, including In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  William Godwin was famous as the author of two particular books, both published in 1793. One was Political Justice, an inquiry concerning political justice, and the other is the novel Caleb Williams, which is a political novel. And he's a utilitarian, he's a radical. He believes in the abolition of all traditional institutions, including the monarchy, but also the church, also marriage, because all of them lock down, lock in the status quo.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Though both Wolstencraft and Godwin are opposed to the institution of marriage, they change their tune when Mary falls pregnant.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  They don't believe in marriage until she is on the way, at which point previous experience teaches them both that marriage will secure her rights, it will secure her legitimacy.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Wolstencraft and Godwin marry in March 1797, setting up home together in London. They keep separate offices and continue to pursue their independent intellectual pursuits. A few months later, at the end of August, the child arrives. Named Mary Wolstencraft Godwin, her arrival is overshadowed by an all-too-familiar tragedy.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Her mother dies 10 days later of puerperil fever, which is an unnecessary but very widespread birth complication. So she has 10 days during which she suffers terribly and knows she's dying. And she and William Godwin talk about how little Mary will be brought up, very much, yes, pleased to child-centered care, child-centered education.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  For the rest of her life, Mary will feel the guilt of having been the cause of her famous mother's early death.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  As well as his newborn daughter, William Godwin is left to care for Wollstonecraft's eldest child, Fanny.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Godwin is left with a stepdaughter, Fanny, who's four and has now no parents, although her father is presumably alive somewhere in the world, and the baby, who is his own child and whom he clearly adores and favors, and teaches to read very young and from tracing her name on her mother's tombstone. So that's a very sad as well as a romantic story.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  In 1801, Godwin marries again, and yet more children are added to the family. His new wife, Mary Jane Clement, is a translator and author of children's books. She brings her two illegitimate children, Charles and Jane, known as Claire, into the household. She and Godwin also have a son of their own, William. But despite being surrounded by siblings, Mary herself lacks maternal affection.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  I mean, she grows up with the figure of her mother. I said, well, the ghost of her mother, but no experience of being mothered. Because even though she does acquire a stepmother when she's four, it's not a great relationship.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  As they grow up, Mary and Claire, less than a year apart, become each other's closest confidants. But with Mary's stepmother making no secret of favoring her own children, the relationship is complex from the outset.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  As befits the daughter of two prominent philosophers, Mary spends her childhood reading. She becomes well-versed in history, mythology, literature, the Bible, Latin, art, and French, and spends many happy hours writing stories of her own. The house is often filled with important literary and political figures, and Mary is often permitted to join the adults for dinner. But it is far from an idyllic childhood.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Her father soon loses interest in his once-cherished daughter. Mary suffers from a number of health problems, including a troublesome skin condition, and is sent away from the family home.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Mary's childhood is a kind of fall from grace. So she's the apple of her father's eye, and she's very clearly not the apple of his eye. By the time she's sent away for her health, she's sent away down to the Kent coast, where she's put in a boarding house. And her father doesn't even accompany her. He sends her with her stepmother. And she isn't back in London for very long before she's sent away again, and this time much further. She's sent up to Scotland, to Dundee, right up on the northeast coast, to a family there who are friends of William Godwin, but friends he has dropped because they are friends from his days as a dissenting minister.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Mary stays in Dundee for much of the period from 1812 to 1814, hundreds of miles from the rest of her family, who remain in London. A short description of her, penned by her father, gives some sense of her as a teenager. In his words, she is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes, almost invincible. It is this strong will that is soon to get her into trouble.

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• 15:47Speaker 02

  In 1814, Mary returns from her stay in Scotland to find that Godwin's family's home life significantly changed. In the years following the French Revolution, Godwin's brand of politics has fallen out of favor in England, and he is increasingly seen not as a brilliant philosopher, but a dangerous radical. The reputational damage affects the family finances.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Mary Jane, being very pragmatic, gets him to start up a bookshop near Smithfield Market. So it's a move to the East End, to near prisons and slaughterhouses. There's a kind of downward process. And when Mary does come home from Scotland, it seems possibly after some kind of romantic entanglement, she comes back not to, you know, the table of intellectuals, but to living as a shop and being expected to help in it. And not surprisingly, that doesn't seem to have improved her relationship with her stepmother.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Soon, young Mary meets a man who entirely distracts her from the somewhat reduced circumstances in which the family are living. Five years her senior, the 21-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley is a poet, author, and political radical, a vegetarian who was expelled from Oxford for co-authoring a pamphlet on atheism. Something of a disciple of Mary's father, he is also an aristocrat and heir to the Shelley baroness.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  And although he doesn't have any money at the moment, he's able to get money actually all his life because he can borrow from moneylenders. He can take bonds against his future inheritance.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  It seems that Godwin hopes Percy Shelley will be able to clear some of his debts. When the poet visits in 1814, he is accompanied by his wife, Harriet. They have one child together and another on the way. But the relationship is somewhat scandalous since they eloped when Harriet was just 16 to marry without their parents' approval in Scotland. It is in her father's drawing room that Mary, also 16 years old, first lays eyes on the handsome Percy Shelley.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  This dashing young man comes to her father's house, is in line with her father's beliefs. So as still, she hopes perhaps her father's golden girl, you know, what could be more apt than that she would also think he was a very good thing? He comes along with his closest friend, William Hogg, and very soon he's courting Mary.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  And William and Mary Jane, fair play to them, do see this as a problem and do incarcerate Mary in the schoolroom.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Even so, with Claire's help, the pair exchange messages and find ways to meet at St. Pancras Churchyard, where Mary's mother is buried. They take long walks together, and it is likely that at some point during this period, their relationship is consummated. Appropriately for our Gothic heroine, some accounts suggest the act occurs on Mary Wollstonecraft's grave.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Throughout all this, Godwin attempts to persuade his wayward daughter to end her attachment to Percy, who is, after all, a married man. But her father's objection is a bitter pill to swallow, given his supposed opposition to marriage.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Mary will prove to be the opposite of her parents in that she is very conscious of herself as their intellectual heir, very conscious of herself as their heir in terms of radicalism. But unlike them, she lives by her radicalism and pays a high price for it.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  For the teenage Mary, Shelley's ideologies around sex and marriage are thrilling, liberating concepts. Yet, as a young woman in a deeply patriarchal society, her position is much more precarious than her lovers.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  One of the interesting things about Percy Bysshe Shelley is that he has these convenient ideas about free love. And unusually, for the time, he doesn't seem to have a double moral standard. He doesn't sort of think that the women he sleeps with, or the women who say yes to him are, you know, insert epithet. Easy, is the euphemism. He thinks they should just generally, well, want to have free love. Of course, what he doesn't take account of is pregnancy and childbirth, and the enormous risk of childbirth is at the beginning of the 19th century.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Infatuated with Percy and steeped in the radical politics of her parents and their circle, in the summer of 1814, Mary makes a decision that will ruin her in the eyes of society.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  On the 28th of July, at the crack of dawn, she and Claire steal out of the Godwin family home. Waiting for them in a coach is Percy, who has left his family behind. Once the girls are on board, they race to the south coast before taking a small boat to France and to freedom.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  But the journey is anything but comfortable.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  It is very early morning on the 29th of July and the sky is still dark.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  On the deck of a small boat sits Percy Shelley and between his knees, lying on her back and leaning on his chest, is Mary. Curled up against a thick coil of rope is her stepsister Claire, her eyes clamped shut in terror.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  The poet supports Mary as she slumbers fitfully, so exhausted and seasick that she is barely conscious.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Hitting a wave, the boat pitches violently. Mary cries out startled and Percy readjusts her in his arms, stroking her hair until her eyes flutter closed once more.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Percy glances up, staring with unease at the sails as they snap in the wind.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  They are hours into what should have been a short crossing to Calais and the wind is noticeably stronger.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Waves crash against the small boat's battered wooden sides. Percy can hear the sailors dark muttering as they attend to the sails. Yesterday was the hottest of July days and it seems a summer storm is brewing.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Dawn is just breaking on the horizon, softening the light of the sinking moon, almost obscured by the gathering deep purple clouds.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  But now pale lightning arcs across the sky, briefly illuminating the tumultuous sea.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Percy hugs Mary closer to his chest as the boat is tossed about. The rigging strains as though every rope might break at any moment and the sailors holler at each other, struggling to reef the sails before they can tear free.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  But their efforts are hampered by the way the boat is pitching and rolling and the concern on their faces has been replaced by a grim terror. Suddenly, the vessel lurches sharply to the starboard side and an enormous wave crashes onto the deck, soaking everyone.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Percy splutters and clings to Mary more tightly, protecting her from the worst of the elements. Whimpering, she buries her head in his chest as he tries to reassure her that the sailors will steady the boat soon.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  But even he can hear his words ringing increasingly hollow. "One more wave like that and they may well capsize and none of them can swim."

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Just when things seem desperate, the wind changes direction. Glancing towards the front of the boat, Percy sees the buildings of Calais on the horizon. They are finally being blown to safety.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  As the sky around them lightens, the storm abates. Skillfully, the sailors navigate them towards a beach, running them aground on the sand.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Percy softens in relief when he feels solid land beneath the keel and Mary opens her eyes.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  The sun is rising. Though he feared the night might be their last, it promises to be a beautiful summer's morning.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  After nearly dying when their boat is caught in a freak summer storm, Mary, Percy and Claire make it safely to Calais. But despite the speed with which they have travelled, Mary Jane Godwin catches up with them mere hours later. She is however unable to persuade either girl to return home and the trio of young people embark on an epic journey across war-ravaged France.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Somehow, they make it through the battlefields to Switzerland unscathed, a journey of almost 700 kilometres. As well as the political troubles engulfing the countries through which they are walking, they struggle with a lack of funds. Percy cannot raise money from French moneylenders in the same way he can in England. Mary is also unwell for much of the trip, but it's not simply a matter of travel sickness.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I think it's worth noting that Mary's sickness at this point because it seems to me highly likely that actually she is pregnant by the time they leave for France.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  While Mary struggles, Percy and Claire, now 16 years old, become close. Not content with having these two young women as his companions, Percy even writes to his wife Harriet, suggesting she join them, though this never happens. This is part of a pattern for Percy, who had at one point been keen to have Fanny, Mary's elder half-sister, live with him too.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Their stay in Switzerland is brief. All too soon, the money runs out and they return to London.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  They get back to London as quickly and cheaply as they can and as quickly and cheaply as they can, in 1814, turns out to be by riverboat up the Rhine. And at one point, they sleep out on deck. They also, at that point in their journey, meet three German medical students. And that night, as they're passing, it's just south of Cologne, they're within sight just about of a range of mountains on which there are a row of Templar castles. And one of them is one of the three Frankenstein castles in Germany. And this one has lots of legends, a sleeping dragon and this buried treasure.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  But there is also the story of a real-life alchemist from a couple of centuries earlier, who was born in the castle, lived there all his life and claimed to have found the secret of life.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Mary will not write her famous novel for another two years, but it seems the seeds of it are planted in the hot German summer of 1814.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  When they return to London, Mary's father refuses to see or help his wayward daughter. The couple move into rented lodgings together, but times are tough. And when Percy is not busy dodging his creditors, he is stretched by his commitments to his wife, who has just been delivered of a son, even as Mary is pregnant with their first child.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  On the 22nd of February 1815, Mary gives birth prematurely to a daughter, but she lives for only a few weeks. Throughout the end of the pregnancy and as she recovers from the birth and the loss, she is comforted by visits from her elder sister Fanny, who is still dutifully living and working in the Godwin home. Meanwhile, Percy and Claire remain suspiciously close. From letters, we know that Mary frequently pleads with Percy for Claire to be sent away. And she is, briefly, in 1815, possibly because she is also pregnant by Percy.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Again, one can't say, but what would be long enough to have a confinement, nurse a child for a little and then come back to society? And what's very noticeable about that absence is that when she does come back, she comes storming back and directly sets her cap at Lord Byron, as if to say, "Okay, if I can't have this poet, I'm going to have another better one."

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Despite his marriage to Harriet and possible relationship with Claire, Mary remains devoted to her lover.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  I think that even if Mary hadn't been tremendously in love, and I think she was, and even if she hadn't also perhaps on top of that thought, as people did then, poetry is the great literary art, it is the profound art to be with a great poet. He is really a great man, greater than even a great statesman and so on. I think that whoever she had become hitched to, she would have been loyal to because I think she just had this, almost like a character flaw, although of course it was a tremendous virtue, this deep fidelity.

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• 31:12Speaker 02

  In 1816, Percy inherits some money from his grandfather, and he and Mary rent a nicer cottage, living without fear of Percy's creditors. In January 1816, less than a year after their first baby's death, their son William is born. Though they remain unmarried, they are now a family, even if Shelley continues to visit Harriet and his other family too.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  In the summer of 1816, the new parents pack up with the baby and Claire and leave London to travel once again to Switzerland. There, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Shelley's friend Lord Byron has taken a house. Percy, Mary, and little William spend the summer there, likely at Claire's insistence. By now, she's carrying Byron's child. It is unfortunately a fairly grim holiday.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  1816 is a year without a summer because there's been a huge volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies, as it was then, and the skies are absolutely thick with volcanic ash and there's still frost in high summer, thousands starve across Europe.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  The Shelly's rent a small house while Byron takes the neighboring Villa di Odata. He is accompanied by his doctor, an aspiring writer named John Polidori. The weather puts a little dampener on things, and the group spend much of their time inside, reading each other German ghost stories translated into French and engaging in philosophical conversations about the nature and meaning of life. Then, one fateful evening, Byron suggests they all write their own ghost story. Despite being published authors, he and Shelley soon give up. Only Polidori and Mary persist. The doctor will eventually publish his effort, The Vampire, one of the earliest of the genre.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  For her part, Mary is influenced more by the philosophical discussions they have been having, as well as the latest scientific experiments with electricity.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Because this is a community of atheists. Their atheism is cutting-edge and radical. They are part of a society and a civilization which is still Christian. And so, there's a kind of default notion of the divine spark. That's what being alive is. What do you have if you don't have divinity and therefore you don't have a divine spark? And the suggestion that's around at that time is electricity because of Aldini and later Galvin, who have been doing demonstrations of passing electric currents through dissected corpses of frogs and then latterly of recently executed criminals. Mary is obviously trying to put together something that is ghostly, and she's thinking necromancy,

• 33:59Speaker 03

  but she's playing with science. And so she writes, obviously, the famous story about Frankenstein, the medical student who overreaches because he wants to find the secret of life and the creature, the hapless creature, but a tremendously talented creature that he produces.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Frankenstein far exceeds Byron's original brief of a ghost story. It wrestles with questions of science and morality and what makes us human. Despite her tender age, Mary's interest in politics and philosophy is clear in her writing. Although she has the idea over the summer, Mary begins the work of putting pen to paper after she, Percy, baby William, and Claire return to England in the autumn. She is simultaneously producing an account of their travels through France and Switzerland, which will soon be published. Yet, her literary efforts are hampered by not one, but two tragedies.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  In October 1816, her older half-sister dies by suicide.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Fanny is regarded as plain and unmarriedable, but she wants to teach. And her mother's sisters, her late mother's sisters, say to her, "Well, you come and teach at our school in Dublin." And then they withdraw the invitation because of Mary's shenanigans with Percy makes the family, makes Fanny by implication, not respectable. And no school can kind of cope with the sort of reputational damage of that.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  There are rumours that she had also been in love with Percy. Then, in December, Percy's wife Harriet, just 21 years old and heavily pregnant, suffers the same fate.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  She is missing for days before her body is eventually pulled from the serpentine in London.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Percy tries to come up with some tall story about how she's resorted to prostitution because her family won't support her. And it's true, her family don't support her, but Percy has been going up and down to London a great deal. And she writes a farewell, "It's all your fault" sort of note. So, one feels that that is a woman that Percy comprehensively ruined, really.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  The exact words in Harriet's suicide note are, "I never could refuse you, and if you had never left me, I might have lived." On the 30th of December, mere weeks after her death, Percy and Mary finally wed.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And what he then does is marry Mary not out of love, but because he hopes that that will make him respectable enough to gain custody of his two surviving children by Harriet, which he doesn't. The Lord Chamberlain doesn't award custody. He doesn't think they're respectable enough. But Mary is by then therefore Mary Shelley.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Percy's children are instead placed with a foster family. But the marriage does finally reconcile Mary with her father. Around this time, she becomes pregnant again and continues writing and revising her first novel.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Her daughter Clara is born in September 1817. Frankenstein is published in modest number and anonymously the following January.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  The initial response is mixed, but a stage adaptation in 1823 prompts much greater success. When she publishes a later edition, she does so under her own name in order to collect the royalties.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  By now, life is becoming increasingly difficult for political radicals in London. So, shortly after Frankenstein is published, the Shelly's take Claire and her infant daughter to Italy to deliver the child to her father, Lord Byron. The trip proves a disastrous mistake. By September, they are in Venice. In the damp and unhealthy conditions of the city, Mary's daughter Clara, only a year old, contracts dysentery and dies. The grieving family winter in Naples, where Mary once again falls pregnant before travelling to Rome in the spring. But their misfortunes continue. In June 1819, three-year-old William catches malaria.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  It soon proves fatal.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Mary, at 21 years old, has now born and buried three children. Not surprisingly, she sinks into a deep depression. But her husband does not acquit himself well. Many of his letters from this period complain that his wife is cold and morose. Rather than spending time by her side, he struts around Rome with other English expats. He takes up shooting and sailing and has a string of affairs, even courting an English friend of his and Mary's, a woman named Jane Williams. Through this all, Mary writes. In particular, she is researching a historical novel, Valperga.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  After Frankenstein, Mary became a much more conventional novelist for her time, rather sort of Walter Scottian, large novels with lots of historical research, but with a feminist slant.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  In November 1819, Mary gives birth to a son, Percy Florence, named after the city in which he is born. But they don't stay still for long.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  They move from place to place. So, they do spend some time in Rome, they do spend some time in Florence, and they end up on what's now known as the Gulf of Poets, between Genoa and, as it were, the foot of Italy.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  They rent a house on the coast with Jane Williams, Percy's possible mistress, and her husband Edward. Despite the awful tragedies she has suffered, Mary is cheered somewhat by the circle of artistic and literary friends they are able to cultivate in Italy, especially in the city of Pisa. For unconventional figures like herself and Percy, it is a much more tolerant and exciting place in which to live than England.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 40:33Speaker 00

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• 41:06Speaker 02

  It is Sunday, February 17, 1822.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  In the northern Italian city of Pisa, Mary Shelley sits at her dressing table in front of a small mirror, adjusting the feathered headdress that sits atop her carefully arranged curls. Standing, she turns one way and then the other, looking at herself from every angle. Tonight, she is dressed in her Turkish costume. The crowning glory of the outfit is the elegant golden robe which hangs from her shoulders.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Someone knocks softly at the door, opening it before Mary can answer. She smiles as her friend Jane Williams slips into the room. Her outfit is of an Indian theme, complete with an enormous turban-like headpiece. From it hang strings of jewels which glitter and twinkle in the soft candlelight as she moves.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Seeing that Mary is ready, Jane quickly shews her out of the room. Their coach is waiting.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  The women descend the staircase arm in arm. Waiting in the hallway by the open door are Jane's husband Edward Williams and Mary's partner for the evening Edward Trelawney. A friend of hers and Percy's, he has graciously agreed to accompany her to this evening's party after her husband decided he is not in the mood to socialize.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  The men see them into the coach and clamber in after them.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Soon, they are traveling through the cool night towards the theatre in the centre of town. When they arrive, Trelawney hands Mary down from the carriage and links arms with her as they head into the building.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Blinking, Mary steps into the brightly lit atrium. A string quartet plays in the corner, serenading guests as they enter. The space is filled with men and women in vibrant costumes, many swathed in oriental silks and satins.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Trelawney leads her swift and sure through the throng and up the stairs to the box they have reserved. The four of them settle into their seats, and Mary places her arms on the edge of the box, padded with plush red velvet. Leaning out, she takes in the magnificent semicircular sweep of the theatre. The seats form a horseshoe around a flat stage area. But tonight, there is no performance. Instead, the theatre is hosting Pisa's famous costume ball. Musicians sit along the back wall playing a lively waltz, and the floor is filled with swirling couples.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Mary is just about to suggest a dance when waiters arrive with a bottle of wine and a platter of meats, cheeses and bread. She tastes everything and sips the drink that Trelawney passes to her, but noticing her preoccupation with the action down on the dance floor, her partner takes pity on her.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Rising to his feet, he sweeps her a gallant bow. Eagerly, she takes his proffered hand, and they hurry down the stairs.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  A lively circle dance has just begun, and the couple find a group to join. Mary does her best to follow the fast-paced steps, laughing loudly as she almost treads on Trelawney's foot. Most evenings, she prefers to be at home with a book. But perhaps not tonight.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Though Trelawney takes a shine to Mary, she remains steadfastly faithful to her husband. And sometime in spring 1822, she becomes pregnant for a final time. On this occasion, it proves nearly fatal. In June, she suffers a dangerous miscarriage, and her life is only saved when Percy sits her in a bath of ice which stops her bleeding.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Her health remains precarious for several weeks, and while she is recovering, Percy indulges his latest obsession.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Despite the fact he cannot swim, he is a keen sailor, and Trelawney, an old sea dog, helps him acquire a boat.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  So Byron has got a boat, and Percy has a smaller boat and has kind of boat envy. And he has a boat adapted, overseen by Trelawney, so it gets kind of a go-fast, a prowl. And it's less stable, and he doesn't test it out.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  On the 1st of July, Percy and Jane's husband Edward Williams set out on his new, untested boat. They sail to Pisa to meet up with some friends newly arrived from England and expect to be gone for several days. Mary and Jane are left at home.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  On the 12th, the women receive a letter from their friends to check that Percy and Edward have made it home safely. But they have not returned. In a panic, Mary and Jane race up the coast to Pisa, only to be told by Lord Byron that the men set sail for home days ago. With no other information available, they are forced to return to the villa to face the agony of waiting for any news of their husbands.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Their fate is not confirmed until nearly a week later, when both bodies wash ashore. They are identified by Trelawney, who breaks the news to Mary and Jane.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  The remains are first buried near to where they are found, but a month later, they are exhumed and burnt, according with Italian quarantine regulations. Mary is too grief-stricken to attend. After her husband is cremated on a beach, his heart is recovered from the fire. For the rest of her life, she keeps it in a silk bag in her desk.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Aged just 24, Mary is now a widow with a young son. Still in mourning, she returns to England with Percy Florence.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  He's a boy, so he's the heir to the Baranets. He's inherited his father's inheritance. But his grandfather, Sir Timothy, will live on and will live on and will live on, and the family refuse Mary any subsistence and any support for Percy Florence as well, because they want to take the child and raise him themselves. Because obviously, for them, Mary is this kind of bedraggled, dodgy, bohemian figure. But Mary refuses, she won't be part of my child. And in the end, they lend her an allowance which is subtracted from Percy Florence's inheritance when he gets it.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Life is not easy for Mary in England. Those complaints from Percy to his friends about her apparent frostiness in the wake of their children's deaths have not been forgotten, and she is shunned by many in their circle. To others, she is still a ruined woman. And though she gets some money from her father-in-law, Sir Timothy, she has to make her living as a writer.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  It's sad, reading her professional correspondence from this time, because she's always writing to publishers, pitching ideas for novels and indeed, non-fiction books. And they turn it down, or they pay her less, and they pay the men. Not only do they not support her, they really exploit the fact she's a woman and she's got no choices. So she does a great deal of hack writing. In particular, she writes a lot of biographical essays for Dionysius Lardner, who has a cabinet encyclopedia, also multi-volume encyclopedia. And she writes "Bargraces Distingus Menov", you know, various European volumes.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Throughout all her struggles, one man continues to recognize her talent, her old friend Lord Byron, who issued that challenge that inspired Frankenstein.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  After Percy died, someone who came out of it really well for Mary was Lord Byron. It's as if he saw her talent. He admired her for writing Frankenstein, and as a teenager, right from the off. And he offered her some work. And he was, as it were, the only one among all those hangers-on and so on who took Mary seriously as a writer. And it's interesting, of course, that he didn't ever, as far as we know, make a play for Mary.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Alongside all of the other writing, she does continue to produce novels. Most notably, in 1826, she publishes "The Last Man", about a global plague that kills most of humanity, leaving only one man alive. It is one of the first works of dystopian fiction.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  She also dedicates herself to editing all of her husband's poetry and prose, finally publishing an edited collection in 1839. It is largely thanks to her that he has the reputation he does now as an important romantic poet. During her widowhood, Mary keeps herself mostly free of romantic entanglements. She has a possible affair with Jane Williams, her husband's one-time mistress. Though her own sexuality remains unclear, she also helps two women friends flee to the continent where they live as husband and wife, with one posing as a man.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Now mostly occupied by her work, she remains exceedingly close to her son. Their lives become easier once Sir Timothy dies and Percy Florence inherits. Even after he marries, Mary continues to live with him and his wife Jane at Boscombe Manor in Bournemouth.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Percy Florence and his wife are really supportive of Mary as a person and as a writer, but also of Mary's continuing work, ironically, to secure Percy Bishop's reputation as a writer.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  This domesticity is more important than ever in Mary's final years, as she suffers increasingly with ill health.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  She dies in the summer before she turns 54, and she dies of a brain tumor, which is awful because she's suffered a lot before she dies, and she's suffered with terrible headaches for years on and off. Her health has got worse and worse, and by the time they moved to Bournemouth, she's really an invalid, and she needs to live with Percy Florence.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Mary is buried with Percy's heart, and her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, are re-interred alongside her. Percy Florence and Jane will be buried there too, in the years to come. In death, the complexity of Mary Shelley's relationships are sorted into a neat Victorian nuclear family. It is a fiction that obscures a daring bohemian reality. Unconventional, trailblazing, and determined, in many ways, Mary Shelley lived a life of which few women of her era could even dream.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  The daughter of two radical political thinkers, she adhered to their ideologies, assuing social norms around sexual ethics, even at great personal risk. She was also an original and innovative novelist, writing arguably the first science fiction and first dystopian books in the English language. Her importance to the literary canon is hard to overstate, and the numerous adaptations and re-imaginings of Frankenstein that are still being made speak to her long-lasting relevance. Even today, her life and work feel startlingly modern.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  I think Mary Shelley continues to fascinate because she's got it all. I mean, she has got the double whammy of having written something astonishing, which has entered not just the mainstream of reading, or even not just the mainstream of film and entertainment, but passed into language. Frankenstein babies, IVF, you know Frankenstein crops, genetically modified crops, now Frankenstein, when we talk about AI. And that isn't because people are being ignorant and getting Frankenstein wrong, it's because she created astonishingly, while still a teenager, within a year, a myth. And then there's her story, both the work and the life. It's an extraordinary combination.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of the Hoover Dam.

• 53:39Speaker 06

  I think of it as a success in terms of accomplishing what it was supposed to accomplish, in terms of water and power. It was a success in terms of things it wasn't necessarily expected to accomplish. It helps create the economy that we now associate with Las Vegas. There's a wonderful architecturalist story named Richard Guy Wilson, who referred to it as a kind of chapel of the machine age. If you look at the dam as an architectural structure, as a design structure, it's really fascinating and impressive. So in all of those ways, it really is a wonder.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www-noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 55:11Speaker 00

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