Mary Shelley is said to have lost her virginity on her mother's grave (described by one social media user as the most 'goth' thing ever). 3. Her mother's grave was handy for something a bit more above board: Mary Shelley learned to write her name by tracing the letters on the headstone.
Did the author of Frankenstein lose her virginity on her mother's grave?
Scholars believe that they did have sex for the first time in this place (with Mary's biographer Martin Garrettt acknowledging the long-held “tradition” of this assumption), since the grave was the location for much of their courtship.
Yet for Mary Shelley, the cemetery was not merely a repository of rotting corpses, but a site of knowledge and connection: It was a place where she read to deepen her literary education and her communion with her mother, and a place where she was inducted into mysteries of sexuality.
Shelley's writing is unusual because her most famous work, 'Frankenstein', uses a multi-tiered frame narrative in a very concise way. Although Robert Walton is the true narrator of the story, one may forget this fact due to Shelley's writing style that contains a story within a story within a story.
Mary begged to take possession of the heart (or what she thought was his heart), which she kept for the rest of her life in her desk drawer, wrapped in some of Percy's poetry. Ah, celebrities. Mary's youngest son thankfully survived to old age, but she lived the rest of her 58 years a widow.
Frankenstein | Part 1 of 2 | FULL MOVIE | 2004 | Horror, Donald Sutherland
What was the age gap between Mary Shelley and her husband?
In the summer of 1814, when Mary Godwin was 16, she ran away to France with the 21-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was then married to another woman. They pragmatically chose to marry when they learned that Mary Godwin was pregnant.
How many children did Mary Shelley and her husband have?
Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley's young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her.
What are some heartbreaking facts about Mary Shelley?
In 1815, Mary gave birth to her first daughter prematurely. The girl only lived two weeks before she died. Stricken with grief, the Shelleys moved to Bishopsgate, but Mary soon became pregnant again.
It wasn't easy, however, and her life was peppered by tragedy. After returning to England, Mary and Percy moved constantly, usually to avoid debt collectors. Their first child, born prematurely, died soon after birth. Three of their children died as infants; only one, Percy Florence Shelley, survived into adulthood.
Her name was Mary Shelley, and she was having a nightmare about a monster made from scraps of humans. Frankenstein, the novel Shelley would fabricate from her vision, is regarded as a fable of science gone wrong. Yet it is also a rumination about art.
Shelley's heart, which the flames did not consume, was taken by Leigh Hunt, who was present along with Byron for their friend's immolation. Mary kept it by her, wrapped in silk and pages of his poem Adonais, for nearly thirty years, until it was buried with her son alongside her in the St Peter's Church.
Elizabeth Lavenza is a character in most iterations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novels and movie adaptations. Though her blood relation to Victor Frankenstein varies between versions of the novel, she is his adopted sister and eventually becomes his wife.
After seeing his first creation looking in the window, Frankenstein destroys the unfinished bride. The monster witnesses this, fails to get Victor to put it back together, and vows to be with Victor on his upcoming wedding night. True to his word, the monster murders Frankenstein's new wife Elizabeth.
What is the age difference between Mary Shelley and her husband?
Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21.
Only one of the Shelleys' four children survived. The first, a girl whose name, if she had one, has been lost to the ages, lived only a few weeks. William and Clara died as toddlers, and the Shelleys were childless before the birth of their fourth and last child, Percy Florence.
What was the cause of death of Mary Shelley's first child?
Mary Shelley actually had three babies who died. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely and died as a result. Her second child, William, died of malaria at the age of three and a half years.
How much older was Percy Shelley than Mary Shelley?
In 1912 at age 14, Mary met poet and future-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, 5 years older and an admirer of her father's writing. Two years later, they began a courtship not approved of by Mary's father, and would meet at her mother's grave in the St. Pancras churchyard until they eloped in July 1814.
Byron weighed in and eventually Hunt gave Mary the heart. Most of Shelley's remains were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Keats was buried. The heart, however, remained with Mary.
Shelley's heart famously did not burn and was given to Mary. Modern physicians believe it may have calcified due to a bout of tuberculosis. Reportedly, it was found wrapped in a sheet of Shelley's poetry after Mary's own death in 1851 and was buried in Bournemouth alongside her.
The couple read and commented on each other's work extensively, even during periods of estrangement during their eight-year long marriage. After Percy's death, Mary continued to write her own novels and essays, but she also had the gargantuan job of poring over scraps of paper to compile a collection of Percy's poetry.
I do recommend a visit to Mary Shelley's grave in St Peter's Church graveyard if you're ever in Bournemouth. Even if you're not interested in Shelley or her grave, it's such a lovely tranquil place for a wander or to sit and read for a while.
