Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein’s Creator was published on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. This biography reads like a gothic novel, and shocks the reader with stories of scandal, family disownment, adultery, out of wedlock pregnancies, miscarriages, suicide, blackmail, and a very strange love story. The reader learns that Mary was mistreated by her step mother and denied the opportunity to attend school. She educated herself by reading books from her father’s extensive library and was frequently found reading by her mother’s grave. Eloping at the age of sixteen with the married Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, both Mary and Percy were disowned by their parents and struggled to support themselves and their children.
While dining with the British poet Lord Byron, Mary got the inspiration for her story of a mad scientist who brings a corpse back to life. Frankenstein was published when Mary was only twenty. Fame and success greeted her, but so also did great grief and despair. Mary was widowed at the age of twenty-four when Percy drowned in a sailing accident.
Her biography reads like a Gothic novel, full of one disaster after another, ending with her own death, from brain cancer, at the age of 53. In a final morbid, but dramatically romantic act, her son had her buried along with the ashes of her husband’s cremated heart; a keepsake she had wrapped in poems and locked in her desk drawer for the twenty-nine years since his death.
