Frankenstein (ePub)

the fall and winter, and apart from various clandestine assignations, Mary saw very little of him. Early in 1815 she began an affair with a lawyer, friend, and creditor, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley, who had become involved with Claire, approved of the liaison. On February 22, 1815, while Shelley was away, Mary give birth prematurely to her first child, a girl, who died twelve days later, shortly after Hogg had helped Mary and the infant move to a different apartment. Mary became pregnant again almost immediately by Shelley; her second child, William, was born on January 24, 1816.

In the spring of 1816 Mary, Shelley, William, and Claire set up house near Lake Geneva, below the Villa Diodati, which was occupied by the poet Lord Byron, with whom Claire had had a brief affair earlier in the year, and whose child she eventually bore. It was a rainy summer, and they spent long nights with Byron and Polidori, his doctor, talking about the supernatural and science, and challenging one another to write ghost stories. One such conversation in mid-June--mostly about galvanism being used to reanimate a corpse--stretched almost until dawn, and when Mary finally got to bed, she dreamed a student built a human being and--as she put it--woke him up with machinery. The dream inspired her first novel, Frankenstein. Its composition was interrupted by a move back to England, intermittent sickness from a third pregnancy, and the suicides of her half sister Fanny and of Harriet Shelley, in October and November, respectively. Harriet, also pregnant by Shelley, drowned herself in the Serpentine.

Mary married Shelley on December 30, 1816. Five months later she finished
>Frankenstein, and on September 2, 1817, she gave birth to her third child, Clara, and published Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour, a travel book. Frankenstein was published on January 1, 1818, and immediately became a bestseller, although she never made much money from it.

Several months later the Shelleys moved permanently to Italy. On September 24, 1818, Clara died in Venice, of an illness that originated with a tooth infection; on June 7, 1819, William died in Rome of malaria while Mary was expecting her fourth child. Consumed by feelings of hopelessness, she wrote Matilda, a melodramatic novel whose theme is father-daughter incest. Her father, who, having become destitute, had begun to beg money from her, advised her not to publish it, and she agreed. On November 12, 1819, she gave birth to a son, Percy, in Florence. The following year she began work on a medieval Italian romance, Valperga, intending to donate royalties to her father, and became pregnant for the fifth time. She suffered a miscarriage in June 1821.

Shelley drowned in a storm on July 8, 1822, in the bay of Spezzia. His body washed ashore about ten days later and was cremated on the beach in the presence of Mary; the poet, critic, and essayist Leigh Hunt; Edward John Trelawny, a friend of the Shelleys' from Cornwall; and Byron, who asked for the skull. Hunt, remembering how Byron had treated the skull of a Franciscan monk found in a Spanish abbey--he made it into an ashtray--declined to see the great Romantic poet's skull thus treated, and refused. Trelawny snatched Shelley's heart from the funeral pyre, causing permanent damage to his hand, and gave it to Mary, who carried it in her purse, some say, for the rest of her life. She buried Shelley's ashes in Rome and returned to England.

Valperga was published in 1823 and, in the following year, the Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which Mary edited. In the next few years she briefly considered two essentially loveless marriages to Americans--the actor-dramatist John Howard Payne and the writer Washington Irving--but ultimately rejected both men. In 1826 she published The Last Man, a tragic-ironic novel in the Gothic tradition that fused fantasy and realism and whose three central characters are based loosely on herself, Shelley, and Byron. She contracted smallpox in 1828.

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, a historical novel, was published in 1830, and in 1831, she revised Frankenstein for republication. Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia commissioned a series of biographical and critical essays on Italian, French, and Spanish writers in 1832 that were published separately as Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain & Portugal (1835) and Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838). A semiautobiographical novel, Lodore, was published in 1835.

Her last novel, Falkner, partially an attempt to absolve Shelley of charges of causing Harriet's suicide, was published in 1837; its eponymous hero was based on Trelawny. She released Shelley's Poetical Works and Letters in 1839. Thereafter she underwent periods of severe illness, with recoveries spent on the Continent with her son, Percy, and his friends. Her last book was Rambles in Germany and Italy. She died on February 21, 1851, in London after a series of strokes, and was buried in Bournemouth.