Mary Shelley (whose birthday is today) stood by Lord Byron on an Italian beach & burned the drowned body of her husband Percy.

When the heart refused to burn, she picked it from the ash & kept it.

I have no clue where she put it after that, but Mary Shelley was metal af.

(Also, Percy drowned because, despite his love of boating, the dunderhead couldn’t swim.

Lord Byron, who’d swum the Hellespont, had repeatedly offered to teach him, but Percy refused. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t be Percy. Don’t choose pride over easy preventatives)

Mary, dragged into their wild company as a (mostly innocent) teen, got the last laugh.

She out-lived all of them.

Finally, we wouldn’t have FRANKENSTEIN without Lord Byron.

Not through any virtue of his own, mind you, but after spending a summer cooped up with him at Villa Diodati, Mary was SO sick of his shit she had to tell the world what an ass he was through the character of Victor.

Mary was the best of that whole lot & all the guys (including poor, conflicted Polidori) couldn’t see it because they were too glutted on their cultural affirmations that MEN HAVE DEEP THOUGHTS THAT MUST BE PUBLISHED.

That, and copious amounts of cognac, opium & hash.

Anyway, happy birthday, Mary.

On behalf of Alby, I apologize for all the rude comments & unwanted groping.

One last thing:

Coolest book I’ve ever held was Mary Shelley’s *own* copy of FRANKENSTEIN, courtesy of Forrest J. Ackerman who hosted me briefly in his Silverlake home & was delighted to show off his collection (including @StephenKing ‘s very first fiction submission)

PS I read the framed first page of that very first submission to one of Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazines @StephenKing - and my lips are sealed.

But, as a writer practically weaned on your work, it was good to see we all start somewhere a little awkward but heartfelt.

Lots of questions about why Percy Shelley’s heart didn’t burn (and was subsequently turned into a keepsake by Mary Shelley), so I guess I am adding to this thread.

It’s a fun detail but not as spooky as it sounds, unfortunately.

When I was first exposed to this event, like most of you, I was mystified why the heart didn’t burn.

I mean, Byron & Mary spent hours on that beach, gathering an enormous pile of driftwood to make a proper pyre. They got almost everything down to ash, so why not the heart?

Imagine Mary & Byron poking through the ash to make certain the job was done & finding the smoking, withered heart of the drowned poet apparently untouched.

Mary (probably): Alas, God has refused to take his heart as punishment for his endless mockery! I warned him.

Meanwhile, Byron, puffing & morose (and probably really sick of standing on the hot, smoky beach): It is the very strength of the poet’s heart that has resisted even the embrace of the flames and so endures in spite of death itself!

(or something similarly bombastic)

Truth is, it’s really hard to burn a human body completely down to ash, especially if you’re working with a homemade pyre.

Bodies have a ton of water in them, so they have to dry out before they really burn & Percy’s corpse had been floating in the sea for days.

Very. Wet.

And even if you get the pyre nice and hot, the heart is a very unique organ. The muscle is especially dense and it resists burning down. It is often the last part of the body, aside from the teeth and bones, to succumb to cremation.

As they left the beach, the conversation between Mary and Byron almost certainly turned to conjecture about why the heart remained.

Given each of their temperaments, they probably had some fairly outré theories.

Too bad there were no smartphones back then to share them.

Guess I’m still not done.

Stories of Mary Shelley’s childhood:

My favorite account involves young Mary & half-sister Claire sneaking out past bed-time & hiding behind the couch to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite his poetry to Mary’s father & his guests.

Mary (who had a kind of free-range childhood thanks to dad) hooked up with poet Percy Shelley fairly young (by modern standards). Percy was already married; had been expelled from college for atheism, and was notoriously strange & wild.

Most of their trysts were in graveyards.

Everything I’ve read on the matter suggests the graveyards were Mary’s idea, but they would have been on-brand for Percy, too.

There’s some conjecture that half-sister Claire got in on the Percy-fucking action (in addition to atheism & anarchy, he was into “free love.”)

Not sure how true we can consider the rumors of a Percy-Mary-Claire threesome. These folks had a LOT of rumors swirling around them & they only intensified once all three became firmly entangled with Lord Byron (who was arguably Great Britain’s first pop star-type celebrity).

Mary Shelley had a rich, tumultuous, and complicated life. Arguably, some of this may have resulted from the emotional pressure of having such big shoes to fill: her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an influential figure in early feminism. She wrote: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mary-wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman

Mary’s mother, a huge proponent for the rights of women (who had the support of several 18th century luminaries, including the mystical poet Blake) lost her life as a result of bringing Mary into the world.

From Mary Shelley’s own journals, we know this weighed on her.

Mary Shelley’s entrance into the world was a difficult one (I recall reading about a forceps scar she carried ever after).

Some scholars see in FRANKENSTEIN an aching note of guilt because, like her monster, Mary was keenly aware she was brought into the world through death.

And I erroneously described Claire as her half-sister above. Claire is actually her stepsister.

I always get the two confused because Claire was much closer with Mary than her actual half-sister.

If this thread has made you curious about Mary Shelley beyond her famous novel FRANKENSTEIN, might I recommend seeing the world through her eyes by reading her journals? She wrote copiously (and when she was terse, it was telling). It’s all here, free: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37955/37955-h/37955-h.htm

And if you get all the way to the end ...

I am not Mary Shelley but I also write things, and the tenth anniversary edition of my Dictionary of Demons comes out Sept. 8 https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Demons-Tenth-Anniversary-Damned/dp/0738765368