Frankenstein’s monster, as horror fans know, did not really spark into life with a bolt of lightning, but was born inside the mind of Mary Shelley during a dreary holiday on a mountainside above Geneva. The inspiration came as volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked out the sun that summer of 1816 and she and her friends, including the infamous, “bad boy” poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, competed to tell scary stories.
But a new collection of the young author’s personal diary entries, out in March, provides strong evidence that, although the stay in the Alps set the grim mood of her novel, her imagination was ignited by something personal and much closer to home.
Shelley’s journals, letters and short stories from this period, published together for the first time, reveal that the dark shadow that hangs over the plot of Frankenstein is the mysterious suicide of her elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay. The poet and Shelley scholar Fiona Sampson, who wrote the introduction to the new collection from Manderley Press, is convinced a secret shame lurks behind this sad death and that it coloured the novel. She also believes she has spotted the fake alibi that gives the game away.
The author, still known then as Mary Godwin, had returned from Switzerland later that year and taken lodgings in Bath with her notorious married lover, Shelley, and their small child. “Hoping for a discreet place to live, they were actually at the heart of what we know as Jane Austen’s Bath, a place of genteel gossip,” Sampson told the Observer.
Tragedy fell on them quickly, and not just once. First, in November, Percy’s 21-year-old abandoned wife, Harriet, killed herself, drowning in London’s Serpentine lake. Then, more significantly for the writer, her sister Fanny, the first child of her eminent mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, by the American diplomat, Gilbert Imlay, also killed herself, apparently inexplicably, in a hotel room in Swansea.
Sampson found the original news report of the discovery of the unnamed body in the archived pages of the Cambrian Times when she was researching her 2018 biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Among clues to the identity of the corpse were the initialled undergarments of their late mother, Wollstonecraft, and a gentleman’s silk handkerchief. For Sampson, however, the key question is why Imlay had travelled to Swansea via Bath, instead of directly from London.
“The coach stop was next to the Abbey Churchyard, where Shelley and her sister were living. But on the day that she arrived in Bath Mary’s journal sets up an alibi,” said Sampson. “When you decode her diary, which was clearly written for public consumption because of her own literary ambition and her mother’s fame, she says specifically that she and Percy took a walk to South Parade for a drawing lesson, the kind of thing she never usually mentions.”
Sampson suspects a family showdown, likely to have been prompted by Imlay’s feelings for the poet her sister also loved, now a free man. “We can make the supposition that she met Percy that day because he immediately set off for Swansea on the news of her death. There is a lot of evidence that Fanny had spoken to one of them. There’s also a suggestion she had a crush on Percy. Perhaps this was the final rejection.” Sampson now hears the sad voice of Imlay, often described as “plain”, in Frankenstein’s creature’s lament: “I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.”
Rebeka Russell, publisher of the new collection, wanted to focus on Shelley’s days in Bath. “Mary’s literary reputation has been subsumed by the monster, by her husband, who was a bit of a cad really, not to mention her mother’s great name, of course. But she was bearing so much responsibility, as a sister, as a partner, as a mother and as the reviled ‘other woman’. This collection shows her as someone with her own extraordinary life.”
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The twin tragedies alter the understanding of the themes of Frankenstein, now about to be a Netflix film, starring Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi as the monster and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It is often read as a warning about the perils of science, but as the daughter of Wollstonecraft, England’s most prominent early promoter of women’s rights, Shelley was concerned with the impact of motherhood and the responsibility of birth. Her own mother, after all, had not survived her birth, dying in 1797.
Maureen Lennon, the playwright behind a new musical drama about Wollstonecraft and Shelley, agrees the two women were chiefly concerned with the limitations on women. “Fanny has such a tragic story,” said Lennon, whose production Mary and the Hyenas opens in Hull next month before its London run in Wilton’s Music Hall. “When Fanny was born Wollstonecraft wrote an amazing piece about how frightened she felt when she looked at her baby. She wanted, she said, for her to be principled and powerful, but also happy. She feared that one of these aims would have to be sacrificed.”
Her show, produced by Pilot Theatre and Hull Truck Theatre and with songs by musician Billy Nomates (aka Tor Maries), will tell the story of Wollstonecraft’s adventurous career and was prompted by the thought that she had never known her most famous child, Mary Shelley. “I wanted to do a show about how we raise girls and young women, because a lot of what Wollstonecraft wrote still feels so modern,” said Lennon.
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