Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Truth About Mary Shelley

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Frankenstein and his monster are household names - even if one is often confused for the other. But what of their creator?In this episode we are meeting Mary Shelley. Did she really lose her virginity on her mother's grave? Did she keep her husband's heart after his death? And where did the gothic novel 'Frankenstein' come from?Kate is joined by poet Fiona Sampson to explore Mary and her life. Fiona's biography of Mary Shelley is entitled ‘In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein’.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Bertwixter Sheeds. Hello and welcome back. But before we can proceed together, I have to tell you from now until the day the show gets cancelled. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adult things in an adulty way covering a range of subjects and you should be an adult too. I don't know why we have to keep telling you that.

I mean, really, what would you be listening to? I mean, really, why would you be listening to? listening to a podcast called Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, if you weren't expecting a serious bucket of source to be assailing your ear holes, but never mind, let's get on with it. Eight foot tall, translucent yellow skin pulled taut over the body, accentuating the muscles and the blood vessels beneath. His eyes are watery, but somehow glowing, and his face is half hidden beneath a mop of long black hair. I mean, I think I've dated worse. That is how the monster built by Frankenstein is described by Mary Shelley.

And not the choice made in the latest movie adaptation where the monster is played by Jacob Allodi, who is fit as fuck. But never mind, we press on. The original wasn't. But what do we know about Mary Shelley? Who was the young girl who came up with such a bonkers and enduring creation? Well, her life had every bit as much drama as anything she put on the page. so let's find out more.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Mary Shelley is a name that is now part of the annals of horror history. She is iconic, and a woman persistently dogged by rumors and scandal and general naughtiness, so she is a perfect subject for this particular podcast. For example, did she really lose her virginity on her mother's grave? What an odd thing to do?

What's wrong with round the back of the bike sheds like the rest of us, Mary? Well, today I'm joined by none other than Fiona Sampson, author of loads of books, including In Search of Mary Shelley, the girl who wrote Frankenstein. And if anyone can help us sort of fact from fiction and to get a better understanding of who Mary Shelley really was, it's Fiona. And although this episode is about Mary Shelley, unfortunately her chosen husband, Percy Shelley, is not going to come out of this very well at all. In fact, we could have included this episode, our little mini-series on History's Fuck Boys.

But if you like a bit of Mary Shelley celebration and a bit of Percy Bashing, this is the episode for you. Let's do it! Hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Fiona Sampson. How are you doing? I'm very well, thanks, Kate. It's great to meet you at last.

It's fabulous to meet you too. You have got multiple accolades to your name. MBE, leading British poet, biographer and writer. And crucially for today, author of in search of Mary Shelley, the girl who wrote Frankenstein. Yes, indeed. We're going to be talking about Mary Shelley today. Mary Shelley. What a fascinating character. Do you remember when you first, I was going to say, we first met her, but when you first became aware of her, I'm curious as to what's the backstory to this book. Yes, I think it's a really good way of putting it, because I think

when you're a bargrapher, you do take it personally, you develop a relationship with your subject. and often the person, as it were, you end up meeting isn't the person you thought you went looking for. I actually would never have pitched to do Mary Shelley as my first literary biography because I meet you such a great subject. But I was commissioned, which was wonderful, and I was commissioned because I had done the Faber poet to poet edition of Percy Bischelli of his poems, which is a great irony because, of course, in my book I'm actually not. that patient with Percy. Thank God. I get so irritated with that man.

And we're persevering. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I just think that when I was reading his work, I was kind of winnowing it down. There's so much verbiage, there's so much, as it were, peacocking and showing off, and so much posturing and sense of himself as a great writer. But there is some wonderful poetry,

but you really have to winnow out too many words to find the Percy who's worth sticking with. And when I think about Mary Shelley, I think about her kind of patience with Percy, perhaps her susceptibility to his kind of self-invention, and also I think about how loyal she was and the way she actually really created his reputation because although he was known in his lifetime,

he wasn't famous in his lifetime as his friend or enemy Lord Byron was. It's really a posthumous reputation, and that reputation was made by Mary in the two posthumous editions she made of his work. So, yeah, it's a kind of story about loyalty and invention and rereading, and she made more than one monster, maybe. She didn't just make Frankestine and his creature. She also created the literary legacy of Percy Bischelli. I hadn't even thought of that before, but you're completely right.

He wasn't that famous in his lifetime. In fact, he spent most of it broke if memory serves. Well, yes, of course, the reason he was broke was because his income and came entirely from being the heir to a baronetcy. And because his father disapproved of his life choices, correctly, one might say, he had to draw down indentures, which kind of betted on he's inheriting. But the result of that was that there were always money lenders who were and money lenders who weren't prepared to lend these indentures, to lend against this future inheritance. And I also think Percy was pretty bad at managing money, as he was pretty bad at managing his life. So those two things put them together and you get this kind of financial chaos that's going on all the time around this young couple, then the household, then, you know, their friends. He's entirely chaotic.

I'm always fascinated by these great men from history, especially like your Percy Bish types. Byron is another one where their reputation of this great mind, this romantic poet, this philosophical. thing of this pioneer of free love and he's looking and you go well that's all very well Percy that's great but what was it like to live with that? What was it like to try and be married to that? Absolutely and the kind of lack of

joined up thinking because you know Percy saw himself well he was an advocate of revolution of class struggle and social revolution but I mean his own income his own status would mean the first thing to be swept away if there had been an English or British

revolution like the French Revolution He actually met Mary by being a disciple of her father, William Godwin, who of course was a radical philosopher, a utilitarian advocating the abolition of the monastery, the abolition of the aristocracy, abolition of traditional institutions like marriage, the relationship with the church and state. I mean, all of this. So I think Percy was perhaps just an excitable young man who was really interested in the moment of revolution and change. He was a schoolboy chemist. And he loved I think throwing up the cards in the air and seeing where they'd land. Another thing that was always going on was that they were always moving.

They were always moving house. It was trying to reinvent this ideal life they wanted to find in one place or another. And that was the case before Percy met Mary as well. So I think there's this kind of attraction to flux. So probably someone with a little bit ADHD, someone who had problems in concentration, which is fine. But then top that up with almost unbridled narcissism. and you really get a life that's sort of out of control. I don't think Percy's going to come out of this particular episode very well.

Let's take it back before we even get to him, because Mary, who is often overshadowed by Percy Bish, but her pedigree, for one of a better word, is pretty impressive. Yes, that's right. She had, and she thought of herself as having, this kind of big league intellectual pedigree. So both her parents were, well, really the best-known radical philosophers in Britain, of their generation. So her father, William Godwin, in 1793, he published two books which

really changed political thinking. One was a novel, Caleb Williams, but you know, a political parable really. And the other was political justice, an inquiry concerning political justice. And that was his masterwork. And that was where he laid out this kind of radical, alternative vision of what you might call citizenship, really, and advocated for, well, the dissolution of the state, ultimately, but also the dissolution of the state. of most of the institutions that held that state in place. And her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is now famous for a vindication of the rights of women, but in 1792, but in 1790 she had also written a vindication of the rights of men,

which was a response to Edmund Burke and Edmund Burke's opposition to the French Revolution. And Mary Wollstonecraft, who saw herself as an educator and teacher, and indeed that was how she earned her living, was herself enough of a acting, revolutionary, that she'd gone to live in France during the French Revolution. Indeed, her first child was born there, out of wedlock and, in other words, living out her ideals. And unfortunately, though, the person who took advantage of those ideals was adventurer, you know, Gilbert Amley. So Scaliwag. A scallywag. A user. Politely put. Yes, absolutely. Someone who in the end, you know, so withdrew not only his support, but he's loved that he drove her to attempt suicide.

but who sent her unaccompanied apart from her child and a nursemaid to Scandinavia to try and sort out one of his financial deals. At a time of war when travel is enormously difficult. So she's like her daughter. She's somewhat susceptible to the bounder. I take a great deal of comfort from that. I mean, I'm very sorry it happened to Mary Wollstonecraft. But if Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the trailblazers of modern feminism,

the woman who first put pen to paper to go, hang on a minute, it, I think that women deserve a bit more than this. If she as well can find herself in Scandinavia because some pretty man said, I love you, then you know, you feel a little bit better about your own awful decisions, I think. That's so true, yes. I think that's true about Mary Shelley too, isn't it? I mean, I think what's quite interesting is the way that conservative institutions, obviously they keep privileged where it is, but the extent to which, actually in this case,

they did protect women. I mean, you know, the institution of family is a, we think of it as a way to own women, I mean, the 19th century institution and family, as a way to transfer women's rights and finances and agency to the bloke, clearly immensely problematic. But issues like paternity, however old fashioned we now see them as,

were a way to enforce subsistence for women from mothers and their kids. and, you know, both of them areas, in adventuring and living boldly beyond convention, really laid themselves open to exploitation. Jamie Cropa, unfortunately. So Mary Wollstonecraft gets caught up with a bounder in a cad and boo, we don't like him. But then she meets Godwin and it's really interested, these two philosophers are both vehemently opposed to marriage. But then they get married.

What happens there? Absolutely. And I think that's not hypocrisy. but learning from experience. I think Godwin didn't want the same for his child, his future child, as had been the fate of Mary's first child, Fannie, still living at this point, well, still living into adulthood,

who had been abandoned and who, in fact, would be always kind of the spare for complicated reasons, some of them to do with how the family configured her, but some of them to do with how she was configured by lack of respectability in this very policed, organized society. And so he and Wollstonecraft got married when she had accidentally got pregnant. So they became lovers. First of all, they didn't like each other.

They met at intellectual, not literary, but intellectual salons, intellectual talking shops, around Sir Paul's Churchyard where all the publishers then were and which were therefore a kind of ferment of ideas. And first of all, he thought she was very opinionated, a woman who didn't know her place. But he couldn't manage to... Wild and William. Absolutely. He managed nevertheless to fall in. love and, as I said, got her pregnant and so they got married, which was great, except that

when she was pregnant, also she was pregnant with our Mary. Mary was born in August 1797, 30th of August, but Mary Wollstonecraft died 10 days later of pure peril infection, you know, caused by a surgeon attending and having non-sterell hands and, you know, it's sexist. It's a terrible death. And what Godwin then did was in a sense undo the good work of the marriage by in his grief and perhaps because he was stubborn and inconsistent, but perhaps because he was irrational because he was grieving, write a memoir of the author of the vindication of the rights of woman in which he revealed that she had lived according to her principles, i.e. that she'd had, you know, she'd had lots of sex outside marriage and she'd had one child born outside wedlock and one conceived outside wedlock.

thus posthumously really damaging her reputation in a way that it took a good couple of centuries to recover from. Shit. And making things much more difficult for Our Mary and for Fanny. Because Fanny is then no natural pairs with a stepfather and she will acquire a step, step, as it were, mother when our Mary does too. And with this kind of label of illegitimacy with her mother. her late mother being unrespectable, de-respectable,

and very dependent on her sister's activities for her own respectability. And when our Mary starts living unconventionally, and so does the step-sister Claire, who comes into both their lives, that really closes down every option for Fanny. Fanny cannot even earn her living as a tutor, a teacher like her mother did, but will end up killing herself in her early 20s. Fannie is a really, really tragic thing.

Mary's sort of born into this, I don't know, maybe it's not chaotic, but it's certainly dramatic family situation where her parents' reputation, it's widespread, but it's also got a lot of scandal attached to it, and her mum has died, and she's growing up in this environment. What kind of childhood did she have? I think you're right that she had a very, let's say, episodic one. So they're living in Summers Town, which was then aspirational, but very, very quickly became one of, you know, Charles Dickens's rookeries.

I mean, became, you know, occupied by multiple tent houses and multiple occupancy. And a lot of immigrants, particularly French immigrants. I mean, you could kind of count Alstoncraft as one of them in a way. And so it was sort of de classé. And Godwin then would start very quickly to have problems with money because Godwin had trained as a preacher, as a religious preacher. And so he had a non-conformist preacher. So he had lost all of that form of respectability, also forms of ways of earning living,

when he launched out as a writer. And he would very soon have to become a publisher and a bookseller in order to try and make ends meet. And that was quite de classé, because fairly soon they would have to move to Smithfield, which was then very rough. It was a meat market. It was also prison nearby within sound of executions. I mean, a really kind of gritty, let's say, environment. So William Goddham was sliding down the financial and therefore the social scale and also taking the family with him.

When Mary was four, the woman who was renting the next door house in Somersetown in the polygon before they moved to Smithfield, who was called Mary Jane Claremont. Actually, Claremont was self-styling. Really, her name was Vile, V-I-A-A-L, not vile like horrible, rented the next door house and quickly made a play for William who was obviously. She had no means of support. she had done some light translation. He was a literary figure. So she used to, whatever, I used to call it Claremont Maneuver,

whenever William Gobbin was in the garden, she'd rush out into her garden and exclaim audibly, oh, you great being, how I adore you. Who amongst us have not pulled that particular stunt? And because it worked, because William Gobbin was... Of course it did. And anyway, he was a bloke. So when Mary was forced...

If a man did that to a woman, it would not have the same effect. No. There would be a restraining order in place. Exactly. Absolutely. Yes. I hadn't thought of him was talking exactly. And then again, William Marries the second time. So there are now three girls. There's Fanny, who is not related to either Mary Jane or William. There is Mary, who is William's daughter. And there is Claire, who is Mary Jane's daughter. There's also a son. Mary Jane also brings a son. And this daughter, who is at present called Jane, but will later style herself, Claire, is, the notorious Claire Claremont, who is going to accompany Mary, our Mary, and Percy on most of their adventures, unfortunately. So Mary acquires his stepmother at the age of four. Mary was very precocious in the apple of her father's eye before that. And the story is that she learnt to read by tracing her own name on the letters of her mother's gravestone in nearby Oldsm-Pancras

tip jarred, very sort of sad and but iconic. But then Mary Jane comes along and obviously doesn't particularly want this daughter to outshine, this tech daughter to outshine her own daughter, close in age and all of that. So the kind of whole person education, which Wolstencraft had practiced and advocated and written books about, and she was a follower of Russo and whatever we think about Russo

and his own issues with his own children and so on, his ideas about education were very modernising. And on her deathbed, during those 10 days, it took her to die, she had made William promise that he would bring up their daughter, according to those ideals. But that quickly slipped away once Mary Jane came on the scene. So there was some language classes, there were piano lessons. There was obviously her father's fantastic library. But she and Mary Jane really struggled with each other. And when she was only 11, she was sent away allegedly for her health, because allegedly she had a skin infection on her

arm down to Kent, where she was in a boarding. It was quite a dodgy, boarding house for seven months. Yeah, by herself. And when you actually read the correspondence between Mary Jane, who took her down to Kent and William Godwin, it's quite clear that she's been sent away to punish her because she's being uppity and difficult. You know, she won't come back until she's better behaved and so on. She does return by then the householders in Smithfield. So suddenly this girl who has sought herself as the air of two intellectual giants is living over a bookshop, living over a shop in Smithfield and expected to help out in the shop. And very soon she's sent away again, this time to one of a non-conformist religious family

who are like from William's old life, from William Godbvre's pre, his old religious ministerial life, up in Scotland. So Mary then spends a couple of years in Dundee, between the ages of 13 and 15, very formative time by herself. Dundee, we shouldn't forget in the context of Frankenstein. was in a great whaling port. And the house is right on the sort of river estuary. She sees the whalers coming and going.

You know, wailing. And what it means to find the true north to go all the way to North Pole is central to what's going on in Dundee. And Dundee's well, it's a bit like Aberdeen and Oil now. It was then it was Dundee and whaling. And of course, wailing will form the frame for her Frankenstein story some years later. And, you know, she's kind of half educated at 16. I'll be back with Fiona and Mary after the short break.

She is about 15, 16, a mess of hormones. We all are at that point. And now enter stage right. Who comes along? Damn it, Percy Bish. How did he end up there? Because as you alluded to earlier, he had quite a privileged start.

He had a very privileged start. So how does he end up in a bookshop? It's such a good question. So Percy, you know, the Eton Schoolboy who's been to Oxford, but has been sent down from Oxford for atheism because he was reputed with Thomas Jefferson Hogg. He's at this time best chose his friend to have co-written a pamphet on the necessity of atheism.

He's anonymous, but he didn't deny it when brought before the university proctor. Didn't he send that, wrote the necessity of atheism and then sent it to, was it like the deans of the university or like local vickers or something utterly? Yeah, exactly. When they questioned him, he didn't deny it. He didn't deny it. He'd written it. so he was sent down from the university and left Oxford without a degree, but was very interested

because he's this young man in love with change in revolutionary ideas and very interested in William Godwin's ideas. So when he was sent down from university, his kind of solution to what to do next with his life was to elope was a 16-year-old called Harriet. And so they went to Great and agree and got married and then they wanted to settle somewhere. So they ended up going to Wales because Wales was mountainous and romantic and not that far from Gretna Green if you think you've come back down a sort of northwest corner of Britain

past the Lake District. They lived in the Elam Valley. They lived in a couple of houses where he had relatives, where he had stayed earlier. And then they became very interested in an attempt at an ideal community, a model community,

inland from what's now Port Mairian, but Pothmatic, on the west coast of Wales. And Pothmatic is a huge enterprise. there's an estuette that's dammed by a great bar that's built across it and a model village, not a very big model village, in fact, but there was a model village. So it's very expensive.

So Percy went down to London to try and raise money for this enterprise from idealists, famous philosophers. So he went to William Godwin, whose books he admired. I mean, hilarious, because obviously Percy actually had a lot more money than William Godwin. But still, he went to Godwin, Godwin, was flattered by the arrival of Percy and Hogg and, you know, sees them and they visit often and they have meals to there and so on.

He's early 20s by this point. Is he Percy? He's 20, yeah. He's 20, okay. So, yes, he's early 20s. So this is how he meets Mary. And by now he has one child with Harriet and Harriet is pregnant again with their second child. So within sort of three months, although William, once he notices, tries to put a stop to their liaison and locks Mary up. You know, Mary is not allowed out. And Percy manages to smuggle his work to her and with its say of vegetarianism. It's so narcissistic.

Do you know what? It just gives to me the super rich trust fund kid who's trying to like slum it as a socialist. And what are they called trustafarians when super rich kids trying to do that and like giving her his poetry to read. Well, really, he should be fucking off home to his wife, quite frankly. Absolutely. But of course, Mary, being, you know, 16, doesn't really understand that the implications of the time having a wife and kids. It's all terribly romantic, isn't it? Exactly. She believes that she's been brought up by her parents to believe, or her father and her dead mother to believe, the ghost of her dead mother to believe. There is such a thing as true love which trumps any tedious human institution like marriage, or indeed, a family. And she believes that theirs is the one who love and, you know, she's naive.

I don't think she's bad. I don't even think she's so. She's just really, really naive. And he's kind of grooming her. I mean, pretty ineffected way to groom one would have thought a book of poetry, but nevertheless, it works. He must have seemed terribly dashing to her. Oh, absolutely. She's, like, you know, she's been raised in this melee of literary greats and literary geniuses, but it's kind of like sort of now a bit tawdry and she's living above a bookshop, she's clinging to these dreams. And suddenly a poet, a young poet, a handsome 20-year-old, a revolutionary atheist who's been thrown out of Oxford is here with his book of poems.

It's just, I can see what happened. Exactly. It's too good to be true, isn't it? Of course, it's a kind of a solution to what she will do next in her life. Is she supposed to just become a teacher like a mum? And in a way, William also precipitates it by not, although obviously he couldn't allow the relationship. because Percy's a married man, by not letting it burn out under his, you know, wing, as it were, he kind of almost forces the elopement. Obviously, he doesn't. It's Percy's responsibility and Mary is that she,

you know, she goes for it. But nevertheless, she does go for it. And in a moment of extraordinary idiocy, she takes with her her step-sister, Claire. Weirdest thing. Before we get to that, can I ask you about the story that she lost her virginity on her mother's grave to Percy? That's a... story that does the rounds every once in a while. It's a lot that does the rounds. And although her mother's grave was vertical, not horizontal, and therefore there are a practical difficulty. There you go. That's a pretty good piece of information for that story. I do think that there's going to be at least a grain of truth in it, because clearly her mother's grave was a significant

place. It was the one place where she could touch her mother. Her mother's great portrait hung above the fireplace in her father's office. But, you know, they had not lived very far. from the graveyard and then they moved to Smithfield and that was a sense of a severance and obviously her mother's support her to Zendiz Place. So there would have been a sense of kind of as it were taking the young man home to meet her mother, taking him to the graveyard.

And Stangas Churchyard then was, unlike now, kind of tree lined and there was a brook and it was, you know, quite attractive. There wasn't yet a railway line and hardy tree and so on. It was rural. It was a little village. It's a pretty church anyway. It was a rural picturesque.

spot. So kind of quite a good spot to take someone you're courting anyway. So I'm sure there was a certain amount of stuff that went on at her mother's grave, whether or not she actually lost her virginity there. However, I also think it is pretty likely that she lost her virginity in London and before they elote because her first child is born in the spring of the following year. Oh, there we go. Right. And because it's nearly obvious that she has morning sickness during the elopement because she's quite often feeling poorly while Percy and Claire go off

and have a high old time shopping in Paris for example. All right, so we've got to talk about Claire. It's the weirdest setup that the whole of this story you can just keep looking at Claire and just keep going, why are you here? What's happening? It's bad enough that Mary, I think she's 15 or 16 by this

point. She's decided to elope with this poet who's got a pregnant wife with a child at home. But then to bring the sister as well, What on earth is going on here? Exactly. I mean, a bit of me thinks she kind of panicked at the last minute and thought, I can't do this by myself.

I've got to take, you know. Because when we say they elope, where did they go? They've gone across Europe, haven't they? Yeah, they go. They nearly die crossing the channel in a small boat. Then they get to Paris. They make their way to Paris. What they're aiming for is to go to Switzerland

because Switzerland is seen as a home of romanticism because it's the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, coming back to Wollstone Car from Rousseau. and it's seen as not politically utopian, but democratic further ahead in the democratic process than even France and therefore an ideal place to get unfound on alternative community, which is what they want to do. Of course, actually the ideal community closely resembles a harring because it will consist of Percy, Mary, Claire,

and Percy writes from Paris back to Harriet inviting her to come along too. Did she say yes? Did she say, what a brilliant idea, Percy, Thanks for that. I'll bring the children. Yeah, oddly Kate, she didn't, exactly. Of course she didn't. With your big ideas about free love. He really irritates me.

It's so selfish this behaviour. It is so 70s rock star, isn't it? I mean, so, oh, you know, go off the bonds of liberation girls. My bonds of liberation. Exactly. So they're in Paris and their plan is to go across France. So they've realised they haven't really got enough money to hire sort of Lando and stagecoach.

They're very dangerous at this point, isn't it? This is through a war zone. Yeah. It doesn't seem to enter their calculations at all. Again, the girls are 16, but Percy is just about a grown up, and he will not be unaware of these facts. So their remedy is to buy a donkey. But Percy and Claire go and buy the donkey while Mary's once again throwing up at home,

or in their lodgings in the hotel. And the donkey they buy is lame. Presumably because they're busy having a great old time, presumably. Well done, everyone. Not paying attention anyway to the donkey and its hooves. Also, in Paris, Mary has brought with her rather touchingly all her juvenilia in a chest, which is lost. So kind of really symbolically, Mary's sense of herself as she and Percy, a writers are going to go and forge a destiny, a literary destiny, a new way of living order. It's kind of truncated, if you excuse the pun, at that moment.

So they start to make their way across France. And the journal, which Mary keeps, which occasionally Percy writes in as well, is weird. It's really sad because she obviously doesn't really get that it's a war zone. I mean, she's very uncompassionate. She just complains about the dirt and she hasn't been given enough to eat and so on. It's really self-absorbed and childish, actually.

There's no other word for it. Even though I fell in love with Mary Shelley, her journal of their trip across France is sad and childish. It doesn't show her in her best light. Anyway, they get ripped off with fair points. They can't, you know, use the donkey. But they finally arrive in Switzerland. And they discover they've got no money.

Percy's got no money left. They can't afford it. They're staying. The only place that can afford is squalid and disgusting. It's not an ideal is a horrible life. So very quickly, they turn around again. and they will be home within six weeks. So it's an extraordinarily rapid transit, really,

considering the way they're travelling too. I mean, they're obviously young and strong. And so they need to get back to Britain as quickly and cheaply as they can. And so they go by riverboat, which is not there in a way of cruising. It's the quickest, most pragmatic, cheapest way of going. And that's really relevant for Frankenstein because they sleep out on deck, at least some of the time.

And they are joined by, some other, you know, not very, not very well-off young people, students, medical students, German medical students, three of them, who are also paying their passage to get back to Cologne. And Mary's General is really interesting about them. There's a kind of real sense of the two sides of personhood, really. So there's a kind of, one she doesn't really mention, there's one who she thinks is really boring and awful, and she doesn't understand why the other one who she thinks of is really good-looking and really well-managed and so on.

We shouldn't really understand why they're friends. So there's kind of two sides of the coinness going on with these two guys, these two German medical students like Frankenstein. And the night that they are out on deck, there's one night where they all sleep out on deck. We know that from the journal. And that's the night that they pass, they come up to Cologne,

and they will pass within sight of the mountain range on which there are three Frankenstein castles in Germany, but one of them sits. And the Frankenstein castle that sits, you can't see the castle from the wrong. but you can see the mountain range is a castle which has loads of myths around it

you know, as buried treasures, a dragon but also a real life story which is that really was in the 17th century, an alchemist who lived there who claimed he'd found the secret of life. Oh, look at that. Look at that in Frankenstein

Castle. So it seems inconceivable that the coincidence of medical students chatting to each other, passing and within sight of the it's obviously kind of like interrail as they're chatting to each other and obviously Mary gets told the story

of Frankenstein Castle Frankenstein of course is a very ordinary name it just means the castle of the Frankish Knights Ah you know it's a Frankenstein but of course for an English year it's a fabulous word and you can't help

feel that it's another way reason why it landed and Mary remembered it Do you think that Claire Claremont and Percy were getting it on That's been debated and discussed by scholars for a very, very, very long time, ranging from people going, no, as if he would do that, through to people going, yeah, definitely, that's absolutely what was happening. What's your take on it?

My take on it is that although we don't yet have any proof, alas, I'm certain that they were. Critics very nicely say that I write the new biography. That's to say, you know, I care about the storytelling. But I am really, really forensic. I do the normal scholarly research. And I'm really forensic. I never invent. So if I'm speculating or positing a theory, I always say, could it be?

And what that could it be means is kind of close reading the balance of the evidence. And the evidence really seems to me to stack up. Number one, the number of entries in the journal, also when they're back in London, where Percy and Claire have gone off again together. Just gone out for the day, but they have. Weird for the time. Unshaperoned young woman on her own. Weird for the time.

Exactly. And Mary writes with regret about it. You know, she's been left behind. It's a bit jealous. A bit jealous. And even, I think that the longest time, she had instincts of jealousy, but she believed in this great love and that couldn't be true. The great love which justified everything she'd done wouldn't be true if Percy could just like casually get it on with Claire or seriously get it on with Claire. I mean, even on the elopement, you know, Percy and Claire are telling ghost stories to each other after Mary's gone to bed. know. Yeah, weird. Yeah. And then there is, by the time, almost as soon as they're back in Britain, Mary is asking Percy for the absence of absentia, Clare eye, and he is in letters. And he doesn't oblige. I mean, he doesn't oblige and doesn't oblige. And although the timescale from 1814 to 1820, when she finally moves off, doesn't seem that long to us. Of course, it's an enormous time scale in the terms of the future of Shelley. so Mary and Percy's relationship and Mary's young life, all that tight and clear is with them

and has a determining role in where they go, where they live, except that in 1815, she's sent off to Linmouth for a few months, which is just long enough to be discreetly having a child, and then the child's, you know, nursing the child may be, and then it's after that time when she's off in lodging, She comes storming back and sets her cap at Lord Byron. If I can't have your poet, I'll have a bigger, better one. That's just what this situation needed, isn't it?

Lord Byron, pretty hell. Absolutely. I'm sure they were. Yeah, me too. Exactly. But the scholar in me says, we can't say for sure. Yes. Agreed.

It's like there, evidently. I'm with you on that one. Just remember the entire time that Percy is around, she's almost always pregnant or she's just given birth or, unfortunately, lots of these children died. don't they, as he's dragging these two teenage girls around Europe through a war zone. Yes, they do. So Mary's first child is born in 1815 back in London Spring and is premature, apparently.

Though I'm not sure that premature, I think, that she was just pretty early than she thought. Yeah, okay, yeah. But doesn't survive. And already at that point, Percy is trying to get Mary to practice free love with his best mate, Thomas Justin Hogg. Fogging. Oh, but Mary isn't. Oh, God.

And it's so obviously. I kind of get out clause. If she does it too, then he can with punity. Oh, yes. Yes, it is. It's shameless. Oh, he gets on my nerves. Really, yes.

And then she has William, Wilmuth, who is born in January 1816. And he will live a little while. He will live a few years. He will die as a young child later when they're in Rome and there's a cholera epidemic. And then she will have... As of the result of being dragged across Europe by a mad, feckless father and who keeps doing this to his pregnant wife and their very, very young children. They're in Rome because they've had to go into exile, he thinks,

because British government is really cracking down on radicals and taking away the right of free-to-speech, free political speech. And the government keeps suspending habeas corpus the right to a fair trial. So early in 1818, Mary and Percy and Claire go off into European exile. And then the third child that they have that dies is Clara, who dies most tragically because she is dragged across Italy, the whole width of Italy, in a heat wave because Percy has been with Claire in Lord Byron's villa.

Byron turns up and Percy demands that Mary arrive to provide an alibi for he's being there with Claire. Twat, twat, twat. And also there's Mrs Percy that we've forgotten about. Harriet, because he is married, everybody, with other children. What happens to her? Well, so Harriet is going to survive until 1817. So in 1816, Claire comes back from Limuth, you know, sets that cap at Byron. Byron is about to leave the country because of his divorce proceedings. It's not only getting divorced, but the divorce proceedings will reveal that he's had

anal sex, which is illegal in Britain at the time. So he has to leave the country for good. Great choice, Claire. Exactly. So Claire manages a one-outstand with him and he's really not interested in her and he writes to his, you know, well, he writes to his beloved half-sister, you know, who's his great, you know, confidant, maybe lover, another story, by having a story, not our marries, that, you know, what could I do? She set a cap at me, you know, what she's supposed to do when it's young. What else? What could you possibly have done? Exactly. So she knows that he's going to Geneva. That's where he's going to start his exile.

Because once again, Switzerland is a place for political exiles, although his exile is actually sociosexual, not political. But never mind. And she says to Percy and Mary, oh, I'm sure you'd find Barron really intellectually fascinating. Why don't we go and follow him to Geneva? And bizarrely, Percy and Mary go yes. What a great idea that is. So in 1816, summer of 1816, they follow. Actually, they get there before. for Byron, but they go to Geneva in the footsteps, sort of pre-footsteps of Byron. And he rents a flash villa, you know, beautiful villa, actually, Vila Diodarte, and the village of Collineau, which is a slight couple of miles from Geneva City,

overlooking the lake, and they rent a smaller house down through the orchards at the bottom, on the lake shore, where there's a jetty and Percy loves sailing, so, you know, they're going to sail up and down the lake. And it's at Villa Diodarte that Lord Byron ends up proposing the writing competition, which will lead to Frankenstein, because 1816 is a year without a summer. So there are storms, there's not just frost in May, there's frost in August, thousand staff across Europe. Again, Percy and Mary, and Claire will have passed through this and kind of it doesn't get a mention in their journals and letters. France does particularly badly because, of course, it's already, you know, catastrophically weighed down by the human cost of Napoleonic wars. And so the situation there is really desperate.

But what that means for the people on Lake Geneva is there's no sunshine, even though it's summertime. And so there's a lot of darkest stormy nights and, you know, all gathering in a salon at Baren's Villa and reading each other horror stories. And Gothic novels have become a thing already in Britain, novels like Otrant. but they want something, they want more thrilled, they want something harder. So they read German shudder fiction. And they read it in French translation, which shows us they don't actually have Germans.

So the conversations with the medical students must have been in a kind of smattering of languages. But they read Fantasma Goriana, which is a collection of 12 of these shower romance shudder stories. They're really all about necromancy, all about raising the dead. Again, we can see that tracing its way in Iraq and size. And so Lord Barnes,

says, according to Mary's own words in her introduction to the 1832 edition of Frankenstein, you know, Lord Byron said, we'll have a competition, we'll each write a ghost story. So the we is Claire Clement, who doesn't take part at all. Percy, Mary, who although she says she listened to their discussions about, you know, what's the spark of life now, we don't believe in God and so on, that was a devout and nearly silent listener, she says. But she doesn't think she's so devout and nearly silent that she's not going to take part in the writing competition. Byron and Byron's personal doctor, John William Palladori,

who Byron doesn't know this, but has a contact from Byron's own publisher to write a kind of, not kiss and tell, but a kind of memoir of his travels with Byron. Oh. So he's a doctor, but he really wants to be a writer. And he, as a result of this competition, is going to eventually write the short story, The Vampire, which is the first vampire fiction and starts that genre. and he's first published as being by Byron, to both Byron's and Polidore's Fury. Byron himself starts a kind of, starts prose, an orientalist short story, but it sort of

starts with a scenario of an Englishman in a Turkish graveyard, and then it like, obviously doesn't know how to unpack it, so it stops, it's just a fragment. And Shelley starts writing something autobiographical, which also hasn't survived. And Mary can't get started, can't get started, can't get started, but then does start the Frankenstein story. And then after that summer, at the end of the summer, when Claire Clermont has got herself pregnant by Byron, Barron is set up with them all, you know, because Claire's pregnant, he doesn't want anything to do with the child, and because Percy has become tedious and clingy and it's banging on about vegetation, he just got sick of them. And they go back to London,

automated 16, that's when Mary will write up Frankestine actually largely in Bath, because they go to Bath, again because of Claire Claremont, because Claire can't be pregnant. We would say pregnant again, but we don't know that. Or pregnant inside of, as it were, the London Gossips. So Bath is not actually the most discreet place you could choose. This is the Bath of Jane Austen and Maritime. Fashionable, you know, the whole fashionable world turning up in Bath. But Claire is discreetly housed away from the centre while she waits for her child,

for Byron's child to be born. Mary meanwhile is stuck also bath because of Claire. Percy is in London. He's not around. But Mary rents above a booksellers right by, right next door to the pump room. I mean, she couldn't be more central. The pump room and the abbey are right next door to each other, Abbey Churchyard. Now it's where the Roman bars are.

But at this state, in the early 19th century, they haven't been re-execrated. They haven't been discovered. It's at the house where Mary wrote Frankenstein, most of Frankenstein. is now the lavatories of... Oh! ...drowing bars and their plaque horribly is by the door to the ladies. It's just awful. Oh, oh no.

I'll be back with Fiona and Mary after the short break. When you read Frankenstein, there's so many different interpretations that you can actually take on it, but I'm always struck by the fact that when you boil it right down to it, Frankenstein is a young, ambitious man who is full of ego and not. narcissism and who has these ridiculously overly romantic dreams, but actually what happens is it ends up destroying everyone and everything around him. And I just read that and I wonder, was she thinking of Percy?

I think she might have been. I agree. Yes, totally. I think so. I think whether she knew it or not, the motive for that portrait of Frankenstein is Percy. Because it's extraordinarily precocious to, well, to create a myth in one year. We've learned in one century, you know, and two archetypes, you know, the overreaching golden boy. Yeah. And the othered, you know, the creature who is othered and by, he's as it were a father, he's maker and therefore, as a result of a bi-society, as a result, kind of goes to the bad.

And I, yeah, I can't but think Percy is very best in Frankenstein. And, you know, everything about his good looks, his good manners, which we were constantly given as assurance in the novel of Frankenstein. goodwill. But I don't think he's any argument for his goodwill. There's lots of birth imagery in Frankenstein, which is really about, you know, creating life. But then like the descriptions of Frankenstein's laboratory, which is like a sordid workshop, it's called.

And I wonder as well, like, did her constant pregnancy and child loss? Did that play into this as well? I think she can't, I think you're right. I think she can't not have been thinking about birth and its alternatives. I mean, I think one of the strange things about the people, picture she paints of Villa Di Adati and the men are talking, you know, about, oh, what's the spark of life? She's the only one who knows about it because she's by then had two children. And indeed, she's pregnant while writing up Frankenstein, latterly while writing up Frankenstein.

Of course, also her mother died as a result of giving birth to her. She cannot not be aware of that. And however normalized it is for her because it's absolutely the story of her life, you know, it's founding myths in a way, she can't but see birth as a dangerous, obviously, everyone who everyone in those days saw understood birth was a dangerous passage for mother and child. But, you know, as really close to death, you know, it's really visceral. I mean, again, everyone's had a child knows that. But yeah, I mean, she's really the first to kind of bring those visceral into the literary culture, isn't she?

The Frankestine myth is astonishing myth, isn't it? And one of the things that I have really, really learned over the years now of kind of revisiting it, we're talking about it, talking about it with different people and different contexts and so on, is just how spacious it is, how many things it opens out into. It's incredible, really. It's an amazing piece of work. It is, isn't it? And one of the things that it does, I think, open out into is mothering, the question, not only of birth,

but of mothering after birth, an upbringing. Wollstonecraft believed in adoption. Wollstonecraft specifically wrote that, you know, nurture could be as important as nature in bonding. And I think that Mary, who never had stepchildren but had been a stepdaughter, did and didn't believe that. But I think that one of the things that Frankestine, her novel, does puzzle over is the unprotectedness. You know, we are thrown into the world. And she tries to stage that with the creature. You know, he's, okay, he's supposed to be beautiful.

Frankestine wanted to be beautiful, he took lots of the most beautiful parts of dead bodies and put them together. And, of course, the result was not beautiful. When the creature gives his great account for himself to Frankenstein, which Frankenstein will then tell to the sea captain going to the ultimate north, Dundee, what the creature says is that, you know, I was naked. You know, when you ran away from me in horror out of your workshop, I was naked. I had nothing. I didn't have language. I understood nothing. He's like a Spartan baby kind of exposed on the hillside.

I mean, he himself and runs out of the workshop also. But he has to learn everything. He has to learn how to be human, which of course we all have to do. But most of us have helping hands. Yeah, exactly. So we've got this young girl pregnant all the time, baby loss, weird sister around. She's written this incredible novel. Mrs. Percy has killed herself by this point, hasn't she?

While Mary is writing Frankenstein, there were two suicides. The second one is Harriet. You walk into the serpentine, the freezing serpentine, and he's pregnant for the third time. And Percy uses that sweetly as an opportunity to claim that, you know, she is a fallen woman and, you know. Oh, he really is a piece of work, isn't he? My God, right, okay. He's been in London all this time while Mary's been in Bath. And Harriet's suicide note implicates him.

She doesn't say, I am pregnant by you, but she says, you abandon me again is the last. store. Right. Okay. Again, the scholar in me says, we can't be sure, but it just does. You can't proceed the evidence very lightly that it was Percy's child. So she kills herself. And Percy will then, at the beginning of the new year, marry Mary, again, for expedient reasons, because he hopes that that will mean that the Lord Chancellor awarded him custody of his children. In fact, the Lord Chancellor doesn't. He doesn't think he's a fit father, so they don't get custody. Well, exactly.

The Lord Charles was white. It's a mess, isn't it? It's such a mess. And meanwhile, also, a couple of months earlier, Mary's half-sister Fanny has killed herself. So Mary's half-sister Fanny is described by everyone in the family is really plain. And I discovered the report in the local newspaper, the Cambrian News, which actually still exists, of the discovery of her anonymous suicided body in the report. Swansea Hotel. Why is she in Swansea? Because she's living in London. Well, she's in Swansea

because her aunt, so Wolston-class sisters, had promised her that she could come and teach with them in Ireland to a school they were setting up. And they'd sailed from Swansea to Ireland. But at the last minute, they told her she couldn't come because she wasn't respectable because of our Mary's shenanigans. Oh, no. Annie is then left with no hope. And she she follows them to Swansea. But very oddly, she doesn't take the usual connections, if you can use that word for stagecoaches, from London to Swansea,

she goes via Bath and she changes at Bath. We know this because in the newspaper report, there's a witness statement from someone who was on the stagecoach with who says she seemed very upset. She got on at Bath. We travelled from Bath together. So why did she come to Bath? Does she come to see Mary or did she come to see Percy?

Or does she come to roast of them? No. And then Mary's journal for the day, I know, for the day in which Fanny changes stage coaches and bath. And the places where the stage, the coaching ins are really close to the centre, really close to Abbey Churchyard where Mary and Percy live. Percy when he comes, you know, when he visits. Not like the other end of Bath and it's a big city. No, no, like 200 yards away.

Mary says, went for a walk to South Parade. I think it's South Parade, which is like, why would you write that in your journal? It's like two streets over. It's like an alibi. And she also says she has a drawing lesson, but it's not the day for her normal weekly drawing lesson. So it's like she's writing alibi. Again, we can't be sure, but it's really peculiar.

And then the newspaper report says, among other things, which are very touching light, that the dead woman has MWG, Mary Wilsoncraft-G, Grewd, embroidered, the initials, embroidered into her stays and she has a little bead necklace but nothing to identify her. But she has a gentleman's red silk handkerchief who gave that to, is it? Persis handkerchief, who knows? Oh, he just needs to be put in the bin immediately. I just, like the wake of heartbreak that this man leaves in his trail is unreal. Because he instantly, when they know, oh, it's strange, we haven't heard from her,

he instantly leaps up, so I must go to Swansea. So he kind of knows something's wrong. Oh, he knows. Yeah. He knows. And then the Sillisard up and drowns himself for what he doesn't do on purpose. But he dies, doesn't he?

After all of this. He dies after modifying his boat because he has got a boat envy because Byron has a bigger, better boat. It's a bit Freudian, isn't it? There we go. And Percy modified. So by now they're living in Italy in exile.

Frankenstein has come out but anonymously. And they live for Peter, in Pisa for a couple of years and Byron is living nearby. Barron, fair play to him, respect Mary as a writer, thinks Frankstein is a great achievement, really has a lot of time for her, and never hits on her. Point for Byron. Oh, okay.

That's not what I'd expect from him. I know. There's a kind of, you know, he really comes out of it very well, actually. He really comes out of Mary's story very well. And the other person who comes out of it really well is Alexandros Maveracodatos, who will be the founder, in effect, of the modern state of Greece, who, okay, Barron goes off, he's going to fight for Greece, and obviously he will die there. But it's Mavracodatus, who remains a kind of pen for Greece.

friend of Mary's, even while he's found in Greece. So again, someone, a man, who really respects Mary and sees her as a thinker and a mind in a person and doesn't seem to have hit on her, though maybe he did. So come 1822, Byron's got a boat, Percy's got a boat, Percy then has his boat modified with a longer prow to go faster and so on. Silly, sod. But it doesn't test it out. Sails kind of across the armpit of, as it were, of Italy, the kind of from near Genoa to

Livorno, coming back, it's caught in a summer storm with the partner, the unmarried partner of the woman he is by then having a romance and probably an affair with. Oh, he just put it away for two minutes, Percy. My God. And leaves Mary, you know, a widow. And Mary will then have terrible difficulties because Percy has by the end of his life been telling everyone, my wife doesn't understand me. and it was so difficult for me.

My genius would be untrammeled if only I could get rid of Mary and domestic considerations. And so when he dies, his circle do not support her. They really abandon her. Lee Hunt has come to Italy to found a magazine. Suddenly his funders, Shelley has gone and Byron's lost interest. But he expects Mary to put him up. So Mary accommodates Lee Hunt, his wife and their large family, paying all the bills for almost a year before she goes back to London.

Where she follows, Jane, whose partner had also drowned in the boat with Percy, who has meanwhile been in London saying, yes, I'm Percy's true love. Mary was such a nuisance, such an incumbent, she didn't understand him. So that when Mary gets tired of London, there's no support there either. And it's really difficult for us to survive. She has one surviving child, Percy, conceived in Florence. Percy Florence is his name. Although he is then the heir to the Baronessy, see, his grandfather won't support him,

wants to take custody of the child. And you can see why. but Mary refuses fair play. And Sir Timothy then says, okay, you can have a really small allowance, but it will be alone. It will be lent against his future inheritance. That's all. And so Mary has to work, become a jobbing professional writer

in order to pay for Percy Florence's education and art keep. And her reward eventually is that Percy Florence becomes a really devoted son and a kind of keeper of the flame. And bizarrely, they end up in Bournemouth of all places. and that is where Mary is buried and it's where she reburied her parents and it's where she's buried with Percy's heart. So they're about to ask you that.

As a final question, is it true then that she kept a piece of his heart? Well, I mean, he might not have been his heart, but it was a bit of gristle that was plucked from the flames because... Sounds quite fitting actually for this man. Gristle where a heart should have been. It was a pretty dried up kernel of a heart,

wouldn't it if it were a heart? So when the boat goes down in a summer storm, eventually the bodies wash up. That's to say, the cabin boy, Edward Williams, who's a partner of Jane Williams, and eventually Percy. And because they've been in the sea, but also because of quarantine regulations in Italy, always, bodies have to be covered in quicklime and left on the beach and then burnt on the beach. And so Trelourney, who was another of the dodgy characters, who's kind of circling around the Shelley, and Nexus is a kind of self-declared sea captain and who is advised on the dodgy boat, which has gone down, thrust his hand into flames and pulls out what he claims is to show

his heart, though, quite how he would have opened the chest cavity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it's probably a big toe or something. Good point. He snatches something. And after a while, Mary has to really push for it because, again, there's this story that, you know, Mary doesn't really love Percy. Mary isn't, you know, Percy's the keeper of Percy's flame. term. Eventually Mary gets it and she keeps in her writing desk and in a little bag and then it's,

oh my God. You have been incredible to talk to. I could keep you here for hours actually. We could just do more Percy bashing because he hasn't come out of this very well. But I think Mary does and her work endures and her legacy in Joes. It does, doesn't it? I mean, I just went to see a preview of the Del Toro film last week and thought, yes, hurrah. You know, the double myth is you know, being perpetuated. And of course, the other thing we shouldn't forget about Mary is we know about Frankston, but we forget about The Last Man. She also wrote The First Distopia novel.

And it's about a world-ending pandemic. Oh, she was clever. Was she? Fiona, you have been magnificent to talk to you. Thank you so much for fleshing out this incredible woman. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, my website is Fiona.com.com. Surprisingly enough, and all my books are there too.

and it's in search of Mary Shelley, the girl who wrote Frankenstein, which is rather a long title, but it kind of made sure we got Mary and Frankenstein in the title. Thank you so much. You have been marvellous. Thank you so much, Kate. This is great. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Fiona for joining us.

And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is, you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got an episode on how 600 women in Renaissance Italy murdered their husbands. And what was Van Gogh really like? Challenging. I think is the word that you would generously use for him. If you would like us to explore a subject

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