Vulgar History - The Wild Life of Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein

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00:00:44.980 hello and welcome to vulgar history a feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is ann

00:01:00.820 foster and this is mary shelley month for the month of october where all of our content is

00:01:06.420 about the iconic goth queen mary shelley author of frankenstein and other things so we've already

00:01:12.600 talked about her mom. We've talked about a book that's inspired by her work. And today we're

00:01:16.700 talking about Mary Shelley herself. Who is she? How did this teenage girl end up at this casa

00:01:24.280 in Switzerland when a volcano went off in Indonesia and then she wrote Frankenstein? 0.72

00:01:30.540 And why was Lord Byron there? How did this all come to be? And all the other stuff about her

00:01:35.420 life you may not know. She's best known as the author of Frankenstein. She lived for a long 0.97

00:01:39.140 time after that. And so we did an episode about Mary Shelley a few years ago. And so that's what

00:01:44.560 I'm going to be playing for you now. I think it's interesting to re-listen to this sort of thing

00:01:48.860 with the new context that I now know, that we all know now from the two-part Mary Wollstonecraft

00:01:54.120 episodes, knowing a bit more about her mom and who she was and how Mary Shelley really tried to

00:01:58.000 live up to her mom's example. So this is me from the past talking about Mary Shelley. And I'll pop

00:02:05.140 in, again, me in the present, just to let you know what's coming up next. 1.00

00:02:17.620 Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. This is a 0.99

00:02:23.180 Halloween super special, and I am Anne Foster. When I was thinking of people to talk about

00:02:29.060 for these halloween episodes again you know it's uh it's a shame i've already done elizabeth

00:02:35.660 bathory but i feel like that's a good one to re-listen to if you haven't in a while because

00:02:40.160 the whole lady dracula angle i mean spoiler she wasn't actually that but she has that reputation

00:02:46.880 last week we looked at a an alleged witch elizabeth woodville and this week we are looking

00:02:52.740 at Mary Shelley, who wrote the famous genre-inventing horror-slash-science-fiction book

00:03:02.740 Frankenstein. And if that wasn't enough reason to make this a Halloween special,

00:03:08.200 the fact that she was literally like the original goth queen. She was hanging out in old graveyards,

00:03:17.740 going on dates with her boyfriend and we'll get into that like at her mother's gravesite she was

00:03:24.600 goth queen but as we are gonna learn in this episode she's also the mom friend of her group

00:03:31.500 she was surrounded by chaotic people like the most chaotic people she could have been surrounded by

00:03:39.880 growing up where she was at that time like that includes both her parents and her stepmother and

00:03:45.980 she was just sort of like, is the eye of the storm a pertinent metaphor? That's what I keep

00:03:52.360 thinking of. It's like everyone around her was the storm. And she was in the middle of it just

00:03:56.700 being like making sure everybody, you know, had dinner and drank water and like got naps when

00:04:03.400 they needed to. So she's the goth queen mom friend. And that's who we're looking at today.

00:04:08.700 So my major source for this episode is a biography that came out in 2018 called In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson.

00:04:20.700 It's such an interesting and unusual biography because Fiona Sampson is a poet, mostly, and she writes this biography, which is again called In Search of Mary Shelley.

00:04:33.780 She's trying to find where Mary is in the existent records of her life because a lot

00:04:39.460 of times the people around her would sort of subsume her.

00:04:42.360 So anyway, it's a very interesting and unconventional biography.

00:04:45.980 Super recommend.

00:04:46.900 Link in the show notes in search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson.

00:04:50.920 I also looked at Wikipedia because Mary Shelley is famous enough to have some, like an actual

00:04:58.160 entry there.

00:04:59.160 Always a treat for me on this podcast.

00:05:00.600 So, Mary Shelley was born, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was her name at birth, in Somerstown,

00:05:09.940 London in 1797.

00:05:12.440 Her father was a philosopher, novelist, and journalist named William Godwin, and her mother

00:05:17.760 was Mary Wollstonecraft, which, here we go, I really can't talk about Mary Shelley without

00:05:24.300 talking about Mary Wollstonecraft, because this really helped shape a lot about what

00:05:28.860 Mary Shelley got up to.

00:05:29.640 So, Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.

00:05:34.220 She is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers. 1.00

00:05:38.060 She wrote many sorts of things, but is best known for her 1792 work, A Vindication of 0.96

00:05:45.640 the Rights of Women, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but

00:05:50.520 appear to be only because they lack education.

00:05:53.720 A shocking thing to say in 1792.

00:05:56.740 Tragically still shocking in 2021.

00:05:59.640 Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings

00:06:03.500 and imagines a social order founded on reason. Maybe that will happen one day, who knows.

00:06:09.680 Mary Wollstonecraft, not just a notable feminist writer, but also personal life, 1.00

00:06:14.780 scandalousness. She pursued a relationship with a married writer, Henry Fuseli, and even suggested 1.00

00:06:22.500 a co-living arrangement with him and his wife. His wife was like, no thanks, and he dumped her

00:06:27.660 to escape the humiliation. She fled to France where the French revolution was underway because

00:06:32.760 she was a fan of revolution. And I just, as a, as a choice, I mean, I have so much respect for

00:06:40.620 the choice of like, she, she threw herself at this man. He was like, no thanks. And she's like,

00:06:44.680 okay, I'm just going to go from England to France and the revolution. Cause that is how 0.89

00:06:50.620 embarrassing what just happened was like, I can relate. So, and she was in France and it was cool

00:06:56.060 being in the revolution, she wrote stuff there. But then when the revolutionaries took over,

00:07:01.880 all foreigners were suddenly forbidden to leave France. She tried to leave France because a lot 0.97

00:07:08.000 of her friends she'd made there were being executed, but she was stuck there. But, you know,

00:07:14.080 silver lining, she fell in love with an American named Henry Imlay, with whom she had a daughter

00:07:19.620 named Fanny. Imlay left her because he didn't like how maternal and domestic she became when

00:07:25.720 she had a child like he thought she was going to be this like tits out what she was but he thought 0.87

00:07:31.660 she was going to just be this sort of like unconventional um skin delicious person and 0.99

00:07:38.140 she probably thought she was going to be too but she had a daughter and she's like guess what i 1.00

00:07:41.000 want domestic life so he left her because he didn't want that but mary waltzencraft just like 1.00

00:07:47.980 oh she needs just like friends she needs a little sex in the city gang brunch to just be like 1.00

00:07:53.740 Look at your choices. So she followed him back to London. I guess France let her leave. He rejected 0.99

00:08:01.460 her again. And she attempted suicide in her depression. She did not complete suicide,

00:08:11.180 kept writing and became close to Henry Godwin, who she knew before and thought of sort of like

00:08:16.740 a brother. But then I guess they fell for each other. She became pregnant.

00:08:20.880 and then they got married. So their child would be legitimate because that would be good for the

00:08:29.700 child's life in the society in which they lived. And that child was Mary Shelley, who is not Mary

00:08:36.540 Shelley yet. She's Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. So it's that thing where women in English history

00:08:41.900 name their daughters after themselves, which again, I've said this numerous times in this

00:08:46.960 podcast. Bring that back. I love, I love a mother naming her daughter, the same thing as her,

00:08:52.000 but tragically Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after Mary was born. She died of that sort of

00:09:00.440 infection you get where the doctor didn't wash his hands before dealing with her after birth, 0.95

00:09:06.480 et cetera. So tragically preventable had doctors at this point believed in hand-washing,

00:09:12.860 which they did not um a friend of mine who is a gynecologist told me they used to like go from

00:09:18.140 dealing with like corpses to like shoving hands up in vaginal areas delivering babies and women 0.55

00:09:25.000 died a lot of the time of infections and they were like can't be my fault so it sucks because

00:09:29.820 she was this amazing revolutionary person this iconoclast and then she died in this awful way

00:09:35.260 and we know a lot about her dying because her husband William Godwin wrote a whole sort of

00:09:40.820 tribute to her explaining the minutiae of how she died in childbirth and all the scandalous

00:09:46.400 details of her life.

00:09:48.400 One, I'm just going to mention this.

00:09:49.940 This is like on par with Mary Toft level distressing medical information.

00:09:53.880 So trigger warning this, this whole episode, trigger warning, suicide, sorry, I already

00:10:00.140 mentioned it once and trigger warning birth, awful things and trigger warning, um, Lord

00:10:09.780 Byron and trigger warning, um, a lot of babies dying. So just know that. So a thing that happened

00:10:20.060 that we know about because William Godwin wrote about it is that Mary was given to a wet nurse

00:10:25.100 to, for breastfeeding and Mary Wilson and Croft was just like slowly dying. And the doctor was

00:10:30.400 like, let's just keep her constantly drunk. And I'm not sure. And the biography I read about her

00:10:37.300 by Fiona Sampson. It's also not sure if that was just to sort of like make her not be suffering so

00:10:42.600 much because she was drunk all the time or if it was trying to be like maybe this will like clean

00:10:46.680 her system somehow. So she was just drunk on wine all the time. She had just given birth and so her

00:10:51.720 breasts were full of breast milk and so puppies came to suckle at her lactating breasts, which 0.97

00:10:57.760 is just Mary Toft level nightmarish, this dying woman. So William Godwin saw all this happen to

00:11:05.160 this woman who he loved and wrote about it. And then unfortunately, he published it. Well,

00:11:10.640 not unfortunately, he published it. But unfortunately, when he published it,

00:11:14.080 this kind of wrecked Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation for a long time, because he talked

00:11:18.580 about how she had lovers and things. And so Mary's dad, not really great with predicting

00:11:25.620 the consequences of his actions. This left William Godwin alone, a widower to raise newborn baby

00:11:33.860 Mary, as well as Fanny. Remember her, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter from the French

00:11:38.240 Revolution. So he published the book about a year after she had died. Kind of wrecked Mary

00:11:45.200 Wollstonecraft's reputation, but Mary, I'm just going to call her Mary Shelley. Like she's Mary

00:11:49.500 Godwin for now, but there's other people's name changes in this and it'll get confusing. So Mary

00:11:54.420 Shelley, the little baby who would become Mary Shelley, she would grow up reading these memoirs

00:11:59.520 of her mother's death. And also all the books her mother wrote, which included a lot of travelogues

00:12:04.820 and diaries and personal things. And William made sure to bring up Mary to cherish her mother's

00:12:09.100 memory. There was a gigantic portrait of her hanging in the middle of their room as well.

00:12:14.040 So there was like a family graveyard as well. Mary, I believe, learned how to write, how to

00:12:19.140 read and write by tracing the letters on her mother's grave, which is like, well, how many

00:12:23.420 letters were there? Well, her mother's last name was Wollstonecraft. So all of the letters.

00:12:27.620 Mary's earliest years seem happy. Her father, you know what? And I respect this of him,

00:12:35.460 William Godwin. He's just like, I can't do this by myself. So he turned to female family friends

00:12:39.960 to help him out with what seemed to be an unusually hands-on parenting approach for this era.

00:12:47.780 When Mary was four, he got married to the girl next door who was a single mother named Mary

00:12:55.520 Jane Claremont. Mary Jane Claremont is an interesting person as well, which there's,

00:13:01.920 I need to stay on track, but just know that she is. There's a lot of people in this episode I'm

00:13:05.920 going to want to talk about, but I'm going to try and stay focused on Mary Shelley. She is our goth

00:13:11.020 queen, mom friend, heroine, but just know that her stepmother, Mary Jane Claremont was quite a

00:13:18.500 character. Mary Jane Claremont had a daughter named Jane, who was eight months younger than

00:13:24.440 Mary and also son Charles, who was five. Who were their fathers? Who knows? But she had these two

00:13:30.720 children. And it seems like Mary Jane Claremont just kind of like saw, potentially moved into a

00:13:36.720 house next door to William Godwin with the intent of marrying so that they could both help each

00:13:41.560 other out and that she could sort of elevate herself in society. So they got married. Mary

00:13:46.360 and Fanny got two new siblings. So now it's three girls and one boy. And eventually Mary Jane and 0.59

00:13:53.280 William Godwin had a son who was named William also, just to keep everything confusing. So,

00:13:58.220 so what's that? Jane, Mary, Fanny, Mary, Fanny, three girls, two boys is just a whole house full

00:14:08.040 of people. This little Brady Bunch situation. Yeah. So in descending order, the children in this

00:14:13.520 blended family are Fanny, Mary, Jane, Charles, and then baby William. Seemingly, Mary Jane preferred 1.00

00:14:20.640 her children to Mary Shelley and Fanny in a sort of Cinderella scenario where she was looking for

00:14:26.980 her children more than she was her stepdaughters. And perhaps this is part of why Mary Shelley

00:14:32.960 chose to become bookish and precocious and clever as people still do now and have for a long time

00:14:40.320 as a way to just deal with a constant chaos of their personal life and not knowing how else to

00:14:47.200 have control over anything. So she became very precocious, very bookish, very clever. Her father

00:14:53.040 would like bring her out at dinner parties of intellectuals and stuff. And he loved that about

00:14:57.900 her. He loved that she was his clever girl. And so this was also her way to like get her father

00:15:02.620 to love her. We're going to see this psychological issue throughout her life story. She received

00:15:09.580 little formal education, like not school school, but her father tutored her on a variety of

00:15:14.840 subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, little field trips,

00:15:20.300 and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him,

00:15:23.880 including the former vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr from Hamilton.

00:15:29.820 Mary, although again, she didn't go to school school, she received an unusually advanced

00:15:34.420 education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her

00:15:39.760 father's children's books on Roman and Greek history. By the time she was 15, her father

00:15:44.660 described her as singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind. Her desire of

00:15:50.920 knowledge is great and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.

00:15:56.300 And if you're wondering, but like, but what does she look like? She had pale skin and light sort

00:16:00.620 of red gold hair that as she got older turned more like brown, which I think is suiting with

00:16:07.740 her goth persona that she would develop later on. She gives me feelings of Lady Jane Grey a little

00:16:14.660 bit, just sort of being a bit of a like know-it-all style teenage girl. Mary also had

00:16:20.300 health problems, which were potentially caused and or exacerbated by the stressful home situation 0.96

00:16:27.040 of a stepmother who hated her. Again, the Cinderella scenario. She was sent away to boarding

00:16:32.600 school for six months because again, if it was because of her health in her early teens, she

00:16:37.480 developed what might be like an eczema sort of skin condition on one arm and hand. It might have

00:16:43.900 also been psoriasis. Like it got so bad that she was at times unable to use her arm or her hand

00:16:51.100 and wore a sling. So like, I'm sure at this time they were like, is this leprosy? So she went up

00:16:57.800 to school and her skin cleared up which sort of suggests that potentially a psychological

00:17:03.700 causation of this issue but also it could just be that they were living in like a place with a lot

00:17:09.020 of pollutants london in the early 1800s they were like above a printing shop i think they're above

00:17:15.080 like her father's printing shop so potentially just allergens anyway her skin cleared up and

00:17:19.500 she came home and then her skin got bad again and so she persuaded her father to send her for fresh

00:17:24.420 not a boarding school, but to stay with family friends in the Scottish countryside, which is

00:17:29.180 what she did. And she went to the Scottish countryside twice. She did two sort of extended

00:17:35.200 stays there. And in between those two extended stays, so by this time, she's 16 years old.

00:17:40.860 And in this era, she met the radical poet philosopher slash fuck boy, Percy Bysshe Shelley. 0.83

00:17:50.160 he was married already and also the father of a young child but percy idolized mary's father's 0.92

00:17:59.740 radical beliefs which had alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family they wanted him to be

00:18:05.520 you know a lord or whatever and he wanted to donate large amounts of the family's money to

00:18:09.980 help the disadvantaged which is like a cool thing to do he also was not into monogamy or

00:18:16.980 the conventions of society, like Mary's parents. But because he had sort of alienated his rich

00:18:23.500 family, he had difficulty gaining access to the money until he inherited his estate.

00:18:28.400 Like his family wouldn't give him money until they died, because they didn't want him to

00:18:32.020 waste it on projects of quote, political justice. So he had met Mary's dad, because that was like

00:18:39.220 his hero. He loved William Godwin's writing, he loved his like radical style. And so he

00:18:45.020 sort of promised like, I will, he had lots of debts, sorry. William Godwin had a lot of debts

00:18:51.320 and Percy Shelley was like, I could pay off your debts. But then eventually it became obvious that

00:18:55.020 he could not because he didn't have any money himself, even though his family was rich.

00:18:59.340 And on top of that, Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother,

00:19:04.680 her mother's grave in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church. And they fell in love like

00:19:09.700 two little goths that they were. Mary's stepsister Jane, remember her, eight months younger. So Mary 1.00

00:19:16.200 had like light hair, light skin. Jane was like of a darker haired thing. Anyway, Jane, BFFs, 1.00

00:19:23.480 helped facilitate these meetings. So she would pass the letters back and forth. She would also

00:19:27.240 quote unquote chaperone, which whatever that means. On June 26, 1814, Mary Shelley and Percy

00:19:35.180 Shelley, again, not yet married, declared their love for one another as Percy announced he could

00:19:40.740 not hide his ardent passion, leading her in a sublime and rapturous moment to say she felt the

00:19:46.760 same. Remember, of course, she's 16, he's 21, and also married and the father of a young child.

00:19:52.800 On either that day or the next, Mary and Shelley had sex for the first time, which was her first

00:19:59.340 time having sex with anyone. And allegedly this happened in the churchyard. Some people

00:20:05.080 think on her mother's grave and i feel like that sounds possible so mary was attracted to percy

00:20:12.960 shelley she loved his wild intellectual unearthly looks and she would call him the elf because he

00:20:19.220 was sort of like fragile and sort of effeminate percy seems to have been attracted to mary's

00:20:26.460 intellect which was like her main like she wielded that but she was also very pretty but

00:20:32.060 was also attracted to who her parents were and the fact that like she was a child of william godwin

00:20:36.120 and mary wallstonecraft he was just like yes please so they fell in love with each other

00:20:42.000 mary assumed her father would approve because that was in line with his stated phyllis like

00:20:46.320 his published um concept of free love her parents had both been into free love they only got married

00:20:52.820 for like legal reasons but in fact he was not he did not approve of this match of the guy who had

00:21:00.220 like pretended he was going to fund him and then didn't, who was married and his own teenage

00:21:04.320 daughter. So it's sort of the thing of like, William Godwin believed in free love and things,

00:21:11.720 but not when it comes to literally his own teenage daughter who he loved so much because she was like

00:21:16.400 the smart one. So with the help of Jane, Mary and Percy ran off together to France. Jane also came

00:21:24.100 along at around this same time, like at around the same time they ran off to France. Mary's

00:21:30.020 childhood writings were all destroyed. So we don't know if Mary did that herself to just be like,

00:21:34.900 I'm making a new chapter in my life, like burning the journals like people still do today.

00:21:38.860 Or if William did that because he was like mad at her. But that's why we have to sort of piece

00:21:44.480 together what were her early years life because all for juvenilia is gone. Even she had a box

00:21:52.080 of treasured papers, including letters exchanged with her father while she was at school and in

00:21:57.440 scotland but when they were in france she left this box in a paris hotel room and it was never

00:22:02.120 found although stay tuned for more about that so this is the squad we've got mary we've got percy

00:22:10.060 we've got her stepsister jane uh jane's mother mary jane chased after them to try and force

00:22:17.420 jane to return home for the sake of her reputation but jane did not but also again like the step 1.00

00:22:24.060 mother. It's just like, fuck Mary, whatever. But like, Jane has to come home. Anyway, if you didn't 1.00

00:22:30.320 know what you think that this trip sounds like, it probably wouldn't go well. Like, in fact, it

00:22:34.240 didn't go well. Three bankrupt people. Mary also got horrible seasickness and she had that her

00:22:39.720 whole life. She liked to be in places, but she was not a good traveler. Also, she was 16 and pregnant.

00:22:48.920 None of them knew what they were doing and they ran out of money. So they traveled to Paris and

00:22:52.900 they had intended to go to Switzerland, but they couldn't afford to get there except for by walking

00:22:57.800 there. So they ended up hired a donkey, walking there with a donkey, which is like big nativity

00:23:04.780 vibes with the whole teenage person named Mary, who is also pregnant. But as they traveled,

00:23:10.080 they read works by Mary's mom, who had written about being in France and stuff. They kept,

00:23:15.620 Mary and Percy kept a joint journal, like a travelogue, continued their own writing as well.

00:23:20.760 Jane was not a gifted writer, but wanted to be. She also just really wanted to be involved with

00:23:27.960 everything. So for instance, at night, sometimes she would ask to sleep in their bed with them.

00:23:32.840 I don't think in a sexual way, but just because she didn't like being left out of stuff.

00:23:37.840 Anyway, eventually lack of money forced them to turn back and go to England. So penniless.

00:23:43.960 They returned to England. Mary was again surprised by her father. Her father was still mad at her

00:23:48.720 where she's like but i'm living the ideals of you and my mom he in fact refused to have anything to

00:23:53.600 do with her and i think this must have been very confusing for her because in her way she was the

00:24:00.220 ultimate like obedient good child and so she was living the way that she would have thought her

00:24:07.320 mother would have wanted her to the way that she thought based on his writings her father would

00:24:10.660 have wanted her to so she's not like rebelling at all she's doing kind of what was expected of her

00:24:15.860 And the fact her beloved father wasn't into it must have been like very confusing for her.

00:24:22.500 So Mary was 16, pregnant, not married.

00:24:25.720 Percy was married, not to her.

00:24:27.500 And he had convinced her in the way that people still do that his other partner was this horrible person.

00:24:34.300 So it's not like he's cheating on her.

00:24:36.640 His wife, whose name was Harriet.

00:24:39.300 Mary just understood like, oh, you know, like Harriet.

00:24:41.980 in this one instance like it's okay i'm having the affair with percy because harriet actually

00:24:46.420 is terrible and also free love is cool in her later years mary would empathize more with harriet

00:24:53.140 and feel very badly for how she acted at this time but again she's 16 and then the squad again

00:24:59.400 mary percy and jane moved together into a flat together to avoid creditors there's something

00:25:06.200 about like people who have bed credit like on sunday could do whatever they wanted and they

00:25:11.200 couldn't be arrested something like that so percy would spend six of every seven days away

00:25:17.200 and with his wife harriet um but then could only see mary one day a week during his like get out

00:25:22.680 of credit free day so mary was very upset by this missed him very much um he also spent a lot of

00:25:29.820 time with jane which she was jealous of but i guess mary not having a good time of her pregnancy

00:25:34.860 like she wasn't able to go for walks. Percy and Jane almost definitely were lovers as well. But

00:25:41.760 Percy's whole thing was free love. So it's not like he was cheating on anyone because like he

00:25:47.700 was pretty upfront about like, here's my deal. Here's what's going on. Percy's wife, Harriet,

00:25:53.280 gave birth to a child shortly before Mary did, which is just kind of like, the timing of it is

00:26:00.320 very Jerry Springer show-esque. Because of the free love situation, Percy wanted Mary to sleep

00:26:07.320 with other people too. And Mary wanted to want that, but she did not want that. Kind of like

00:26:13.900 her mom. She thought she believed in the whole free love situation, but actually she really

00:26:18.840 liked monogamous domestic life, much to her surprise. So Percy had a friend called Thomas

00:26:24.520 Jefferson Hogg, who became a friend and a confidant to Mary. And Percy was like, Mary,

00:26:30.980 why don't you sleep with him? And Mary was like, like, she didn't say no right away because she

00:26:35.680 really wanted to believe in free love. But in practice, she only loved Percy Shelley and seems

00:26:41.060 to have ventured no further than flirting with Hogg, particularly because she was pregnant at

00:26:45.100 this time. She gave birth prematurely to a girl who she named Clara, but the baby was two months

00:26:50.920 premature, which is like still risky even now. And back then, I mean, incubators didn't exist.

00:26:57.060 So Clara died after one month. This obviously made Mary super depressed. She was haunted by 0.99

00:27:05.860 visions of the baby. And then she became pregnant again three months later because she was a fertile 0.99

00:27:11.540 teenager. And she gave birth to a second child, a boy who she called William, which is the third

00:27:19.280 William in the story. So named after her dad, I guess. He was nicknamed Will Mouse. And we're

00:27:24.540 going to call him that just to not confuse with her half-brother, William, or her father, also

00:27:29.180 William. So meanwhile, famous dirtbag, Lord Byron was in London. He wasn't in London very much

00:27:37.840 because he was so scandalous. He'd been kind of like kicked out of London or something like that.

00:27:43.220 Jane schmoozed her way, even though he was like not really interested in her, but she was just

00:27:49.020 like but what about having sex with me and she just sort of like kept on it until he did and

00:27:53.600 then she fell for him and i think it's the sort of thing there's going to be a lot of armchair

00:27:57.880 psychology in this episode but i think it's like she saw mary was with this famous writer so she's

00:28:02.660 like what if i'm also with a famous writer but he left and she jane was pregnant and she decided to

00:28:10.900 chase him down to try and convince him to be with her and to have to be his mistress she wrote to

00:28:16.220 him a lot. And he was like, please go away. And so she was like, but what if do you want to meet

00:28:21.220 my friend, Percy Shelley? He's like a writer. I think you two would get along. And Lord Byron

00:28:24.900 was like, I guess. So she got Mary and Percy to come along. They were sort of her excuse for

00:28:30.680 visiting him where he was in Geneva. So Mary and Percy, baby wheel mouse and Jane all went to

00:28:37.840 Geneva because Jane refused to take no for an answer. Kind of like Mary Wollstonecraft, frankly.

00:28:45.520 Mary Shelley would later write,

00:28:47.240 It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.

00:28:54.000 Why was this?

00:28:55.800 So, major weather situation going on.

00:28:59.620 So this is 1816.

00:29:01.260 One year before, Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, erupted a volcano,

00:29:07.820 and it filled the Earth's upper atmosphere with volcanic ash, blocking up the sun and creating a volcanic winter.

00:29:13.200 i'm quoting all this from fiona samson's book because she describes it well so across the

00:29:19.940 world average temperatures are one degree centigrade lower than usual and the anomaly

00:29:24.500 is significantly greater in western europe a region coincidentally already experiencing food

00:29:29.020 shortages caused by the napoleonic wars and the british corn laws this volcanic eruption is a

00:29:34.900 volcanic event on a scale unequaled since the hatepe eruption in the year 180 and killed thousands

00:29:41.500 in its own region, again in modern-day Indonesia. It was also the latest in a cluster of major

00:29:46.260 eruptions across the world, which since 1812 already released large amounts of dust into

00:29:50.920 the atmosphere. So when Tambora erupts, its effects are even more dramatic. Brown snow

00:29:55.780 fell in Hungary and red snow in Italy. Sunsets are more colorful than they'd been before.

00:30:02.700 And also this comes on top of what's known as the Little Ice Age, which is how the European

00:30:08.360 climate had been cooling since the 14th century. Within this general cooling, there have also

00:30:13.520 been cold temperatures caused by the Dalton minimum, which is a time of exceptionally low

00:30:19.640 solar activity from 1810 to 1823 that further depresses average earth temperatures by one

00:30:24.700 degree centigrade. Even today, May 1816 holds the records for the lowest sunspot activity ever

00:30:32.140 recorded. So this means during the summer that the squad spent in Geneva, there are frosts in

00:30:38.540 August, crops have failed, and there's ice in the Swiss lakes. Roughly 200,000 people will die

00:30:44.420 across Europe alone from these conditions. Famine has caused rioting in Switzerland,

00:30:49.080 where conditions are among the worst on the continent and the government declared a national

00:30:52.640 emergency. 130 days of rain between April and September caused Lake Geneva to flood the city.

00:30:58.080 and into this we have the world's unluckiest travelers just like chilling out for the summer

00:31:03.820 and this is of course where the famous thing happens which is they're sitting inside because

00:31:09.360 it's cold and rainy and volcanic ash outside and just like the awkwardness of like jane being there

00:31:15.800 wanting to get with byron byron not wanting to be with her but her being pregnant mary's got a baby

00:31:21.640 like anyway so they're all hanging out around the fire um they amused themselves by sharing

00:31:28.400 german ghost stories like reading them out loud and then byron proposed that they each should

00:31:32.920 write a ghost story mary couldn't think of one right off the top of her head because like

00:31:37.220 postpartum has a baby lots going on but during one evening in june their philosophical discussions

00:31:45.080 turned to the nature of the principle of life unable to sleep that night she became possessed

00:31:49.840 by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her waking dream, her ghost story. So she

00:31:55.600 started writing her entry in the ghostwriting story contest, which she would expand into her

00:32:01.440 first novel, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. She later described that summer in Switzerland as

00:32:07.700 the moment when I first stepped out from childhood into life. Bear in mind, she was at this point,

00:32:12.520 18 years old and the mother of a young infant. And she was just like, I'm just going to like

00:32:16.940 casually like invent a genre of fiction and write one of the greatest novels of all time

00:32:23.500 like while surrounded by her chaotic friends and then the squad minus byron because byron is just

00:32:32.900 like bye they returned to england and they went to bath mostly so that jane could hide her out

00:32:40.480 of wedlock pregnancy slash baby bear in mind that jane is also like 18 19 years old as well

00:32:46.120 mary and percy still not married and in fact percy still married to harriet so they're just

00:32:50.880 like two teenager teenage sisters um and one of their married lover hiding out in bath so mary

00:32:58.220 is just like again you know quickly realizing jane and percy are not ones to be counted on so

00:33:04.760 she's the one who's kind of finger let's find an apartment to live in let's like how do we get

00:33:08.960 groceries. Although Percy had enforced this sort of, I think it was happening by this point,

00:33:14.300 this especially ill-conceived vegetarian diet on them. Like he was like, we shouldn't eat meat,

00:33:20.400 but they didn't eat like other protein substitutes. They just ate vegetables all the time,

00:33:24.860 which would contribute to Mary's overall ill health, one would assume. 1.00

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00:36:03.900 and we're back anyway so while they were in bath mary received alarming letters from her

00:36:11.320 from fanny remember her older sister one of which seems so serious that percy rushed off

00:36:16.640 to find her without success and then on the morning of october 10th this is all

00:36:21.180 like frankenstein she started writing in june and now it's october that same year um her sister

00:36:27.480 fanny was found dead in a room in an inn along with a suicide note and a bottle of laudanum

00:36:33.660 which is what is it it's absinthe mixed with opium no what is it wait it's an alcoholic

00:36:41.160 solution containing morphine prepared from opium um used as a narcotic painkiller

00:36:47.480 anyway so she had died by suicide her sister fanny who like again i gave the trigger warning

00:36:58.300 there's going to be a lot of death and a lot of suicide in this story because so that was october

00:37:02.920 10th fanny was found dead and then two months later on december 10th percy shelley's wife harriet

00:37:09.120 also died by suicide she was discovered she drowned herself in the serpentine a lake in hyde

00:37:14.320 Park in London. So that's a lot of things going on. Harriet's family. So Percy Shelley

00:37:23.180 was trying to take advantage of at this time, I believe English law was that the father would

00:37:30.280 take custody of children in the instance of the mother's death. So Percy was like, well,

00:37:34.940 I'm going to take two children with Harriet. I think Mary was like, yes, this is fine. I'm cool 0.71

00:37:40.480 with a blended family. Let's do it. So Percy Shelley wanted to get them, but Harriet's family

00:37:45.140 was like, that's not going to happen because you are clearly a useless person. Percy's lawyers 0.98

00:37:51.580 advised him that if he, Percy, got married again, that would improve his case to get custody of

00:37:57.080 the children. And so he and Mary, who is pregnant again, she is effectively constantly pregnant and

00:38:03.000 or grieving for like the next 10 years of her life. She's pregnant again. They got married to 0.58

00:38:09.420 help him try and get custody of his other kids and then one month later jane gave birth to a

00:38:14.740 daughter she named alba which is so alba is similar to what the squad had called lord byron

00:38:22.940 who's if the first letters of lord and byron are lb so they called him lb and so she called his

00:38:29.200 daughter alba which i guess was like look i named the daughter after our inside joke please let me

00:38:33.720 be your mistress or whatever. Not going to work. And then Percy Shelley was found morally unfit to

00:38:41.760 assume custody of his children. And so they were placed with a family of a clergyman. And then

00:38:46.220 Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, a daughter she named also Clara, which was the name

00:38:52.420 of her first daughter who died after a month. So just like children being born, people dying,

00:38:57.720 drama happening in the midst of this Mary Shelley aged now what 19 is like writing Frankenstein

00:39:05.000 one of the greatest novels of all time let's see so she finished Frankenstein which was published

00:39:10.620 anonymously reviewers and readers assume that Percy Shelley was the author because the book

00:39:16.440 was published he wrote a preface to it and the book was dedicated to William Godwin who was

00:39:21.100 Mary's dad but also Percy's hero but he was still Percy still in debt because his family wouldn't

00:39:27.320 give him money and he was useless with money uh they were also they had ill health again i think

00:39:34.620 based on the vegetables only diet and they were also worried that because of the they were worried

00:39:40.760 that they would lose custody of their children too not just like william and clara so basically

00:39:46.620 they're like let's go to italy and jane was like and me too and at this point if you're like why

00:39:54.520 because you've probably heard of jane named changed her name from jane claremont to claire

00:40:01.020 claremont which frankly was who she was meant to be if you had the option to be claire claremont

00:40:08.820 who wouldn't take that option so jane changed her name first to clara which is weird because that

00:40:13.380 was the name of mary's first dead daughter and also second daughter but then she changed it to

00:40:17.720 Claire and everyone's like, okay, Jane, just like, sorry, Claire, Jane, Claire just really wanted to

00:40:25.000 be the main character in the story. And she very actively was not, but did she become the main

00:40:32.500 character of my heart as I was researching this? Yes, she did. Like Claire Claremont is a heroine

00:40:40.280 to me now. Anyway, she's changed her name. Now she's Claire. He used to be Jane. Now she's Claire.

00:40:44.200 she has her daughter alba and then she's like hey you guys are going to italy can i come along so i

00:40:49.900 can like give my daughter alba to lord byron because um he is rich and i want him to raise

00:40:56.980 her instead of me a 19 year old so they or they left cloudy polluted england to go to the warmer

00:41:04.440 climates of southern europe but unfortunately at this time the warm climates of southern europe

00:41:10.240 were the breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid and dysentery as well as cholera and

00:41:15.480 again these three people have bad luck in traveling but also just like don't plan ahead very well but

00:41:21.480 also how much planning could you do there's not photos guides so they headed south on like

00:41:28.540 continental europe during the first cholera pandemic like of all time i don't know i just

00:41:33.200 wrote the first cholera pandemic typhoid dysentery cholera all particularly dangerous for foreign

00:41:39.500 born children like will mouse and baby clara and alba who lacked immunity to local infections and

00:41:45.380 have not acquired useful antibodies from their mothers i think we all know about this by now

00:41:50.120 so these were all novel diseases to these poor little children but they're off to italy so

00:41:57.280 one of their first tasks was handing baby alba over to lord byron where claire i'm sure tried

00:42:02.780 to like be like but i could be your mistress now and he's like never talk to me again he agreed to

00:42:07.760 raise Alba as long as Claire had nothing more to do with her or him. And he also insisted on

00:42:13.640 changing Alba's name to Allegra. So minus one baby, the Shelleys plus Claire plus two babies

00:42:22.520 then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place for long and devoting

00:42:26.880 their time to reading, learning, sightseeing, and socializing, and also in acquiring communicable

00:42:32.560 diseases. So baby Clara was fragile and ill. I think she had dysentery, but Clara was like,

00:42:42.020 but I miss my daughter Allegra. Can we just like go visit her and also Byron? And so they went back

00:42:48.620 to visit him in Venice again, but the stress of this extra trip was too much and baby Clara died

00:42:55.040 of dysentery age one. One year later, Willmouse died of malaria age three and a half. So this

00:43:03.380 Italian era was one of intense intellectual and creative activity for Mary and Percy as they both 0.68

00:43:10.220 wrote a lot and Claire just made a lot of chaos mostly, which I stan. Mary was often physically

00:43:17.360 ill again like eating only vegetables prone to depression obviously i mean both the ongoing

00:43:25.080 postpartum situation and like the death of three three children in the course of as many years

00:43:33.280 um she also had to cope with the fact that percy was actively sleeping with claire and also with

00:43:39.460 other women because of free love and she wanted to believe in free love and mary just like could

00:43:45.340 not that she was not that woman. She's not that girl. And then as a life is not dramatic enough

00:43:52.020 in 1820, Mary and Percy were plagued by accusations and threats from two of their

00:43:57.740 former servants, Paolo and Elise Foggi, who had been their servants and then they were fired.

00:44:05.460 So these two revealed that while in Naples, Percy had registered a child named Elena Adelaide

00:44:13.340 Shelly, and he had registered her as the child of him and Mary. But the Fugees said, but Mary is 0.82

00:44:19.920 not the mother. We think the mother is Claire Claremont. So did Percy and Claire have a secret

00:44:26.300 baby? Did Percy and Mary adopt a baby? Like Mary clearly did not have a baby named Elena.

00:44:34.440 Mary was, so the accusations and threats, I guess, were like, we're going to say that he had a baby

00:44:39.340 with your sister and everyone will say that's gross. And Mary's like, nope, Claire was not

00:44:42.720 pregnant. I would have noticed. I noticed things, but maybe Claire was pregnant, but they're hiding 0.98

00:44:49.380 it. Anyway, we don't know who or where, who was Elena Adelaide Shelley? Where did she come from?

00:44:55.520 Why did Percy register her? Um, whoever she was, uh, they left her in Naples and Elena Adelaide

00:45:03.380 Shelley died one year later. So that was a whole thing that happened, but based on the overall lack

00:45:12.420 of concern with birth control, I would not be surprised if Percy and Claire had a baby. Although

00:45:18.880 I don't know if Claire would have like left the baby. Anyway, so after leaving Naples, they went

00:45:24.680 to Rome. Well, in Rome, Mary began writing another novel, Valerius, the reanimated Roman,

00:45:32.800 which is frankly an excellent title. But again, William died and she stopped writing because

00:45:40.260 obviously she was sad um she's also pregnant so because she was also she was always grieving

00:45:47.120 and or pregnant like i said so five months after will mouse died mary had another baby who's she

00:45:56.760 named percy florence so percy after his dad florence after the city they're in i just want to

00:46:02.440 like remind you by now that she's still only 22 like she has written one of the greatest novels

00:46:07.380 of all time she has had four children three of whom have died in infancy like she's between you

00:46:16.900 know she's 16 years old just kind of being like can i go to scotland for the summer and now just

00:46:20.460 like where her life has landed her is quite extreme two years pass and then mary pregnant

00:46:26.380 you know evergreen always so the squad claire still always there um and there's two new squad

00:46:34.920 members who are edward and jane williams who are also people who are super into free love and

00:46:39.700 they're like common law married but not married married jane williams is percy's lover as well

00:46:45.540 mary is just kind of like long suffering like i understand what harriet lived with now and they

00:46:51.380 went to a place called villa magni at the sea's edge near the hamlet of san torrenzo in the bay

00:46:59.500 of Lerici. And while they were there, the squad learns that Claire's daughter, Allegra, who had

00:47:06.100 been taken in by kind nuns who loved her, because Byron was not going to like raise a baby, had

00:47:11.900 died of typhus. So just like yet more child death. So they're in this cool place, but everyone's

00:47:19.000 not doing well for a multitude of grief related reasons. Mary was especially unhappy

00:47:26.020 in the villa magni which was remote and which was cramped she came to regard it as a dungeon

00:47:32.100 it was like her her husband her husband's like two lovers like she had a miscarriage um and lost so

00:47:39.300 much blood that she nearly died but because the villa was so isolated had they waited for a doctor

00:47:45.920 she might have bled out and died so percy sat her in a bath of ice to staunch the bleeding

00:47:51.400 and the doctor later said actually saved her life so good job percy so he saved her life but he was 0.98

00:47:58.860 still fucking around because he's just like oh mary you're no fun with your like depression and 0.97

00:48:04.640 your like reasonable reactions to life's events and you're like wanting to be domestic with me 0.99

00:48:11.240 which to be fair like percy had never presented himself as someone to be domestic with mary just

00:48:17.540 like her mother, discovered too late that she kind of wanted that more traditional life.

00:48:24.440 Anyway, so then Percy and Edward got a new boat. They were really excited about it. They called it

00:48:29.820 the Don Juan. And they went sailing down the coast. And they stayed there for a week. And then

00:48:36.340 they set out on their return trip, but they never arrived. So Mary and her friend Jane Williams,

00:48:45.220 There's a lot of Janes in the story as well. So like, again, it's like useful. Claire changed her

00:48:50.140 name to Claire. So Mary and Jane rushed desperately in the fading hope that their husbands are still

00:48:56.980 alive to see if they had just like washed up somewhere or whatever. But 10 days after the

00:49:00.680 storm, three bodies washed up on the coast. Oh, the third body was their boat boy, Charles Vivian.

00:49:05.900 Anyway, the three bodies washed up. It was Percy. It was Edward. It was Charles Vivian.

00:49:10.700 Percy Shelley was cremated, but for some goth reason, his heart refused to burn.

00:49:17.760 Doctors these days theorize perhaps that his heart might have calcified due to an earlier

00:49:22.720 boat with tuberculosis. I think it's just goth as fuck. So Percy's friend Lee Hunt 1.00

00:49:29.060 originally claimed the heart because he was there for the funeral cremation and felt he had a right

00:49:34.660 to keep it. Who are you Lee Hunt? Like eventually Mary got the heart and she kept it in her drawer

00:49:40.780 because she is our goth queen mom friend. So, Oh, here, here's who Lee Hunt is. So after Percy

00:49:49.580 died, Mary stayed living with Lee Hunt and his family in Genoa. She visited with Byron because

00:49:56.080 she got along with Byron. Um, Claire was not around presumably. Um, she transcribed Byron's

00:50:02.940 poems. She resolved that now that she was a single mom, she was going to make a job of being

00:50:09.120 a writer, but her financial situation was precarious. You know, it is still now for

00:50:14.180 writers, but then for writers and because, you know, printing press, still a newish invention, 0.99

00:50:22.260 her being a woman, people not being cool with a woman writer. The fact that she's like, I'm just 0.94

00:50:26.320 going to like be a writer. That'll be my career. Again, probably inspired by her mom and dad.

00:50:30.980 but meanwhile her co-widow jane the widow of edward who also died in the shipwreck and who

00:50:37.680 had been sleeping with percy she went back to england and she kind of like danced all around

00:50:43.960 just being like hi it's me jane and i am the true love of percy shelley's life mary is his just like

00:50:50.580 cold distant widow but like she's not even sad really and that's because mary was at this point

00:50:56.620 she dealt with so much death and just like awfulness in her life. Like she was stoic in

00:51:00.820 the face of tragedy. But Jane was like, that's because Mary never loved him. Only I loved him.

00:51:06.340 And it was really a lot like how Mary had been against Harriet in the first place. But Jane

00:51:12.280 still pretended to be friends with Mary, wrote her letters being like, could you stay in Italy?

00:51:16.700 I think it's good for you if you stay in Italy. So that Jane could like continue to slander her

00:51:20.260 all over London. And then Jane won the heart of Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Do you remember him? 0.88

00:51:26.300 He was the guy who had been, who Percy wanted Mary to sleep with before.

00:51:31.020 And he was like Mary's good friend.

00:51:33.040 So anyway, they eventually got married.

00:51:35.860 So it's kind of seems like Thomas Jefferson Hogg just kind of liked to be in love with

00:51:40.600 whoever Percy was in love with and not really the person at all. 1.00

00:51:43.840 So just like, fuck that guy. 0.99

00:51:46.200 Mary eventually returned to England in 1823. 0.99

00:51:49.640 So Percy's dad, Sir Timothy Shelley, she was kind of hoping, hey, you're rich and

00:51:56.040 things. Can you like support me and your grandson, Percy Florence? But Sir Timothy was like, only if

00:52:01.840 I, only if Percy Florence is handed over to an appointed guardian, Mary's like, no, I'm staying

00:52:08.600 with my son. Like I love him so much. And so she managed to convince Sir Timothy to give her a

00:52:13.700 limited annual allowance, but he refused to meet her in person ever and dealt with her only through 0.99

00:52:20.280 lawyers because he was, he sucked. And I guess because the whole like scandal of it all or 0.97

00:52:26.360 whatever, Mary Shelley was like, fine, I got the money. I don't need to like have face-to-face

00:52:31.020 time. She worked, um, she edited Percy's poems and other literary endeavors because she loved

00:52:39.460 Percy and she wanted people to see his work and for him to be a famous poet. And she actually

00:52:44.720 was very successful with that, with her collections of his poems. Sir Timothy was like, okay, but if

00:52:49.620 you write any sort of biography of him i will cut off your allowance so mary shelley wasn't really

00:52:55.380 able to like write an ode to him like her father had done for her mother she was not doing well

00:53:03.160 financially she had this allowance she had some money from writing but she was basically living

00:53:07.040 in poverty i think her dad liked her again though she got to hang out with her dad and some of his

00:53:12.180 like smart philosopher friends and things but there's still lots of people who still disapproved

00:53:17.820 of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley because the whole him being married when they

00:53:22.340 got together situation. Um, Mary moved to Kentish town in North London to be near Jane Williams,

00:53:29.320 who she did not realize had been bad-mouthing her own England for two years actively. Mary

00:53:34.560 was working on her novel, The Last Man at this time. And, oh, this is a section I call Mary

00:53:40.920 Shelley ally. So one of Mary's actual friends, not a jerk like Jane was Isabel Robinson. 0.96

00:53:47.560 And Isabel Robinson actually is the one who eventually told her, like Jane has been spreading lies about you, saying like you never loved Percy, that like Percy loved her and stuff. 0.51

00:53:57.220 Isabel Robinson was also an unmarried mother.

00:54:00.760 Mary helped Isabel elope to France as the wife of the writer Mary Diana Dodds.

00:54:08.080 So I don't know much about Mary Diana Dodds, but I do know that she cross-dressed as Walter Schulte Douglas. 0.95

00:54:15.060 So Mary Shelley, an ally to this queer couple, Mary helped them obtain false passports. 1.00

00:54:22.640 And then when they were in Paris, she went to visit them in Paris because they're all 0.57

00:54:25.540 pals and Mary Shelley ally.

00:54:28.180 When she was in Paris, Mary got smallpox because like, what has this woman not been through?

00:54:33.620 But she recovered.

00:54:35.520 During the period 1827 to 1840, Mary Shelley stayed busy as an editor and a writer.

00:54:41.620 she wrote several things but i want to especially note she wrote a novel called the fortunes of

00:54:46.560 perkin warbeck perkin warbeck is a person who in real life has a great name and he lived in the

00:54:54.540 war of the roses era and so he was a guy who you remember the princess in the tower scenario where

00:55:00.160 elizabeth woodville's sons were like trapped in the tower and then richard was like i don't know

00:55:04.240 what happened to them i guess they're just gone or whatever so i don't know 20 years later a guy

00:55:10.300 showed up and he's like my name is Perkin Warbeck but aka I'm actually one of the princess in the

00:55:14.040 tower and I should be the king and stuff. Mary Shelley wrote about it. I feel like she was

00:55:19.400 part of our tits out brigade like in the scandalous history stories writing a little 0.96

00:55:24.360 book about it. She also kept championing Percy Shelley's poetry promoting its publication 0.86

00:55:31.440 quoting it in her writing just like really making him a star but also sort of whitewashing his life

00:55:37.840 story so that people wouldn't think less of him for his like free love ideals and stuff um she

00:55:45.220 was sick like i think she was just had illness a lot not just smallpox but remember like the

00:55:49.640 eczema slash psoriasis slash leprosy starting in 1839 she suffered from horrible headaches and

00:55:56.480 bouts of paralysis which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing but her main thing she

00:56:02.040 worried about was the welfare of her son percy florence who guess what survived into adulthood

00:56:06.820 thank God. She honored her husband, her late husband's wish that his son attend public school

00:56:12.680 and had him educated at Harrow. Sir Timothy helped pay for that to avoid boarding fees because she

00:56:19.280 was again, not rich. She moved to Harrow on the hill herself. So Percy could attend just as a day

00:56:24.640 student. Percy Florence was devoted to his mother. Good for him. And after he left university, he came

00:56:30.780 to live with her. So this is the part how Mary got her groove back. Mary was courted by an American

00:56:37.820 actor-poet called John Howard Payne, but she refused him after he attempted to define the

00:56:43.420 relationship. Also, while she was in France with her queer friends and having smallpox,

00:56:48.280 a poet and dramatist called Prosper Merrimay announced that he was in love with her, but she

00:56:53.080 rejected him. We're just friends. Prosper, Mara May, she said. I imagine. She fell for

00:56:59.780 Aubrey Beauclerk, who was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. They seemed to have had an affair,

00:57:06.240 and Mary was like, I think I found the one you guys, like she was writing in her diary.

00:57:10.240 She thought he was going to propose to her, but instead he proposed to a 19-year-old heiress,

00:57:15.560 presumably for money reasons. Mary was super upset about this, and then she either got the flu,

00:57:23.080 were just like super depressed. Like she fell ill with sadness. But after six years, his,

00:57:30.800 the 19 year old, who I guess then became a 25 year old, drowned by accident in a pond,

00:57:37.600 which to me sounds very suspicious, but I read a lot of mystery novels.

00:57:40.980 So Mary was like, oh my God, he's available again. So she thought maybe he'd propose to her now,

00:57:45.960 but he didn't. And she's like, well, I'll just go on holiday to Italy with Percy Florence.

00:57:52.000 And so when I come back, maybe he'll propose to me, but when she gets back, he's already

00:57:55.400 married another woman, 20 years younger than Mary.

00:57:58.440 So not meant to be.

00:58:00.940 Mary recorded her trips with Percy Florence and more travel memoirs.

00:58:04.060 She was just like, like people today.

00:58:05.880 She's just like the hustle economy.

00:58:07.660 Like everything she did, she turned into a memoir. 0.99

00:58:10.340 So she could always have more books.

00:58:11.600 She's like writing novels.

00:58:12.880 She goes on a trip, but after the trip, she turns a trip into a book.

00:58:16.060 Like everything is just like, cause she has a literary spirit, but also needs money.

00:58:22.000 So, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died, and then Mary and Percy Florence got to be financially independent for the first time ever, which is good because at this time, Mary found herself the target of three separate blackmailers first.

00:58:38.980 In 1845, an Italian political exile called Gattessi, who she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him.

00:58:46.660 I guess, allegedly, sexy letters.

00:58:49.660 A friend of Percy Florence bribed a police chief into seizing the papers, including the letters which were then destroyed.

00:58:55.600 So she outsmarted that first blackmailer.

00:59:00.240 Shortly afterwards, Mary Shelley herself bought some letters that she and Percy had written.

00:59:05.520 okay so a man called g byron was posing as the illegitimate son of lord byron and he said i've

00:59:13.920 got some sexy letters that he wrote with percy and i'm gonna like publish them or whatever and

00:59:19.080 mary had worked so hard to like make percy's reputation better so she bought the letters

00:59:22.860 from him but they were probably all fake or maybe there was no letters i'm not sure and then also

00:59:28.280 in 1845 percy's cousin thomas medwin claimed to have written a damaging biography of percy shelley

00:59:35.500 he said he would suppress it in return for 250 pounds. Mary refused. And I guess he's probably

00:59:41.400 lying. The thing about the person who had the letters though, that could have been, remember

00:59:45.820 way back, she lost the box of letters in the hotel in Paris. Like she wasn't famous then,

00:59:52.460 but if someone found it. So I think she knew like it could have been letters. And then her son,

00:59:56.880 Percy Florence married yet another Jane, Jane Gibson Sinjin. You see how I pronounce that?

01:00:04.020 that's what british people say saint john so jane gibson singen married percy florence and

01:00:10.400 mary lived with them both and i think they're all cool like they lived in the shelley family

01:00:14.320 ancestral home they had money they all got along things were good except for mary had illnesses

01:00:19.700 in 1851 she was aged 53 she becomes gravely ill and falls into a coma and she dies of what seems

01:00:28.520 to have been a brain tumor. So Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her parents, but her son

01:00:35.680 and daughter-in-law decided that the graveyard at St. Pancras, the one where Mary had like gone on

01:00:39.960 all the walks with Percy, where she had maybe lost her virginity to him, where she learned how to

01:00:43.980 read, Percy Florence and Jane were like, this place is dreadful. So instead, we're going to

01:00:48.500 bury her at St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth near their home. On the first anniversary of

01:00:54.340 Mary Shelley's death. Her son and daughter-in-law opened her desk or she had a box desk. I don't

01:01:01.220 know, a desk that is also a box. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she

01:01:06.940 had shared with Percy Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaius with one page folded around a silk

01:01:13.020 parcel containing some of his ashes and his heart. Literally goth is fact. She just kept his heart

01:01:20.240 with her and her desk all the time. Her grave was reopened and the heart was buried with her.

01:01:26.500 So in her own lifetime, Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer. The reviewers often missed

01:01:32.640 her writing's political edge. So her book was first published anonymously, but then later it's

01:01:36.920 published with her own name, which is, there's a movie version, I think it's called Mary Shelley,

01:01:42.920 and it stars Elle Fanning. And I like it a lot. She's, it's just, I love Elle Fanning in a

01:01:48.060 historical movie. She's just like slouching around, like super pale and gaunt, just looking

01:01:53.200 like goth queen. There's a nice moment where it shows how her father helped to have the book be

01:01:59.920 published under her name. So this is like similar era to Jane Austen, for instance. Jane Austen's

01:02:06.260 books were all just published by, quote, a lady. So the fact that Mary Shelley had books published

01:02:10.440 by her name was pretty major. So she was a writer during what must have seemed like the dawning of

01:02:16.300 a new age of gender relations. However, Queen Victoria became queen in 1837 and would bring 1.00

01:02:22.340 with her long reign a newly conservative era of gender relations. So again, from the biography

01:02:29.260 by Fiona Sampson, it's a really good biography. Mary's literary life could be seen as the last

01:02:37.240 stuttering of the revolutionary spark that her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, ignited. Other English

01:02:42.920 women writers of the 19th century, like the Bronte sisters would publish using male pen names

01:02:47.480 and Evans would publish as George Eliot. Like this could have been a moment where more women

01:02:51.780 write under their own names, but instead that is not what happened. Directly after her death 0.98

01:02:57.300 and for a long time, Mary was mostly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley because she

01:03:01.940 had worked so hard to make him really famous to the detriment of her own acclaim. But although

01:03:07.240 the author Frankenstein, like Frankenstein was very popular, has always been very popular,

01:03:11.020 always in print um it was turned into plays like right away because copyright was not a thing then

01:03:18.780 or something anyway like she went to go see some of the plays she's like how cool someone made a

01:03:22.200 play of my book too bad i didn't get money for it so she was kind of like mary shelley isn't this

01:03:28.920 cute she wrote frankenstein and was married to percy bush shelley who was a wonderful famous

01:03:33.000 person but um in 1989 it took until 1989 that the first full-length scholarly biography of mary

01:03:40.640 Shelley was published, which was by Emily Sunstein. It's called Mary Shelley Romance

01:03:44.740 and Reality. And part of the reason, so Mary had sort of tried to make Percy more palatable

01:03:51.360 after he died. And then her son, Percy Shelley, and Jane also tried to sort of whitewash her

01:03:58.820 memory by censoring biographical documents. And so this helped contribute to the perception that

01:04:03.840 Mary Shelley was a more conventional and less reformist figure than she actually was. She was

01:04:10.140 actually quite radical. And just kind of the way that she behaved after Percy Shelley died, 0.55

01:04:14.900 like the way that she avoided public controversy, the way that she just kind of kept to herself,

01:04:19.840 added to the impression that she was just like a quiet, little mousy, little wifey person.

01:04:25.780 And then also some other people like Thomas Jefferson Hogg and other admirers of Percy

01:04:30.520 Shelley also downplayed Mary Shelley's radicalism and kind of what she was like in general. But

01:04:36.900 here now we all know the truth and that's mary shelley so time to give her a score now this is

01:04:46.280 where it's interesting and i've been thinking about this honestly all week knowing i was going

01:04:49.320 to be recording this scandalousness from mary shelley because of who her parents were and the

01:04:54.320 way she was raised like the way that she behaved was not scandalous because this was how she was

01:05:01.260 raised to behave like she wasn't bucking well she was bucking conventional society but she kind of

01:05:05.820 thought she was being good. You know, she wasn't like, I'm going to run away with my boyfriend

01:05:11.560 and be a cool rebel. She was like, I'm going to run away with the man I love. And like,

01:05:16.440 as a statement of the philosophical concept of free love as advocated by both of my parents,

01:05:22.020 both noted academics, like everyone saw it as a scandalous thing, but to her, it wasn't.

01:05:28.280 And the way that she lived her life, like she was in contrast to, for instance, Claire Claremont,

01:05:33.860 like she's the goth queen mom friend like she was surrounded by all these outsized chaotic

01:05:40.940 characters but mary was like the responsible one so i feel like this might be controversial

01:05:47.260 but i'm gonna give her i was gonna give her a five i'm gonna give her a six for

01:05:53.140 scandalousness because even though her intent was not scandalous like it was taken as such

01:05:59.600 by society, but it's not like, I wouldn't say more than a six. Like she was actually very

01:06:04.440 responsible in the context in which who she was surrounded by. Scheminess is like, this is also

01:06:11.460 challenging. Like, do you consider her writing scheming? Like, do you consider the fact that

01:06:15.900 she like schemed ways to get money? Like, I think she was, I think that's how we'd have to,

01:06:23.400 because she wasn't, again, Claire Claremont, scheminess, much higher level. Mary Shelley

01:06:28.560 you though like like she was very um i don't know you know she's like a radical revolutionary and

01:06:34.560 stuff but she wasn't like scheming i don't think i think she was but like she was like i'm gonna

01:06:40.060 write a book i'm gonna publish it under a pseudonym then i'm gonna like get sir timothy to

01:06:44.820 like pay us some money like i mean for a six for scheminess as well like it's not she wasn't 0.51

01:06:52.260 scheming to like murder people or whatever but she was like she had a plan and she executed it

01:06:56.820 and i respect that significance i have no problem with a 10 that is like her significance to like

01:07:05.780 she invented horror novels in the english language like that is like frankenstein is a cultural thing

01:07:13.940 that like everybody knows still to this day like how many of percy shelley's poem does anyone know

01:07:20.260 you know like she's significance is major and also the fact that she was like a woman writing like

01:07:25.640 very significant. I would say, I think she would say I'm significant because I made people care

01:07:30.820 about Percy Shelley. And I'd be like, I love you, but no one cares about Percy Shelley.

01:07:35.160 The sexism bonus is so this is kind of like how much, how did sexism get in her way

01:07:42.400 of achieving her goals and dreams? And I think she achieved her goals and dreams. I think what

01:07:47.240 got in her way was kind of society looking down on her and the fact that she had had these children 0.59

01:07:56.380 out of wedlock which I guess is sexism really like it's the patriarchy was making it hard for

01:08:01.020 her to be a woman writer making it hard for her to to get money for anything because she was so

01:08:07.000 shunned from society but that's more like society than it is like sexism I'm gonna say just because 1.00

01:08:12.720 like she was publishing books and she had to hide her name in the first place. Seven, seven for 1.00

01:08:19.040 sexism, which is a 29, a 29 for Mary Shelley. I think that's great. You know, who else is a 29 0.89

01:08:27.000 Elizabeth Bathory. So maybe it was just a cool score for somebody who is a Halloween super

01:08:34.020 special subject. 29. I feel good about it. So other people are 29. Lady Catherine Gray has a 29.

01:08:40.380 elizabeth bathory is a 29 lady jane gray 29.5 and didn't i say that mary shelley kind of reminded

01:08:46.560 me of lady jane gray a little bit so that's mary shelley it's a whole it's a journey i came out of

01:08:55.240 like i'd read about her before but i like really dug into it this time and i came out of this like

01:09:00.080 really super respecting her but also just being like really interested in claire claremont to

01:09:04.980 the point that i feel like i'm gonna do a claire claremont full episode because she's just like 0.68

01:09:09.400 chaos incarnate. And I love the fact that she's just like fucking up everybody's lives constantly. 1.00

01:09:16.720 And she lived the longest out of anyone from the squad, Claire Claremont. Um, so this is Vulgar 0.71

01:09:24.060 History. My name is Anne Foster. Here's some little reminders. So especially because I was

01:09:29.820 talking so much about the biography in search of Mary Shelley, I'll have a link to that in the

01:09:34.020 show notes, but I super recommend it. It's a great book. Um, and you can find that and other books

01:09:38.380 that I have recommended on this podcast at my little bookshop page, which is bookshop.org

01:09:44.720 slash shop slash vulgar history. I've also got inspired by Mary Shelley, some new merch in the

01:09:51.580 merch store. I've got t-shirts and a fanny pack that say goth queen mom friend. Cause I feel like

01:09:59.560 what's more mom friend than having a fanny pack. You know, you keep all your stuff in there just

01:10:03.940 to keep your friends, Claire Claremont, Percy, Lord Byron, you're just like, Ooh, do you need

01:10:09.460 some Advil? Ooh, do you need a tampon? Like anyway, goth queen mom friend is there. Um,

01:10:16.300 there's also one that call it that I is just called witch out, which is like tits out, but 0.98

01:10:20.920 it's witch out. I don't know. I thought it was cute. Anyway. So the store is at vulgarhistory.store 0.97

01:10:26.380 vulgarhistory.store. Remember you can use code tits out for free us shipping or tits out 10 for

01:10:33.080 10% off your order. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so or slash me. I have a

01:10:40.840 Patreon page, which is patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. And that's where you get early

01:10:45.960 access to episodes of Vulgar History. And then you also get to vote in polls to help me decide

01:10:50.400 who to talk about. Like next week's subject is going to be someone who the Patreons chose for

01:10:55.520 me. And then also in the Patreon, I do monthly mini episodes called So This Asshole, where I

01:11:00.820 talk about gross men from history, which also the Patreons helped me often choose who to talk 0.85

01:11:06.000 about. And after all of this, I feel like Lord Byron and or Percy Shelley could get a cute

01:11:11.080 little episode there. Anyway, patreon.com slash Anne Foster writer. I super appreciate everyone

01:11:16.060 who supports me there. And if you want to support me without spending money, you can go on to Apple

01:11:22.000 podcasts or wherever you are, except for Spotify, because you can't leave reviews on Spotify.

01:11:27.120 but if you are on spotify you could just like open a different podcast app and leave a little

01:11:32.020 review for me because or rating the five stars you know that whole thing i appreciate it but

01:11:38.160 also it helps us with like the algorithms and whatever you can follow me in the podcast at

01:11:44.800 on instagram at vulgar history pod on twitter at vulgar history and 1.00

01:11:49.720 talk to you next week keep your mask on and your tits out 0.99

01:11:57.120 so you might think okay now we've done the mary shelley episode is mary shelley month over 0.99

01:12:07.240 no we're just halfway through mary shelley month there's so much more mary shelley content coming

01:12:11.940 your way this month of october because you know when i started the podcast i did an episode about

01:12:16.140 her great you know as part of this little halloween series i was doing at that time but now there's so

01:12:21.100 much more to say about her we've talked about her mom we've talked about mary shelley and now we're

01:12:27.120 The next week's, next week's new episode coming up is going to be a discussion with somebody who's been spending a lot of time lately researching and thinking about Mary Shelley and her legacy and what we don't talk about when we talk about Mary Shelley.

01:12:39.720 So we're going to just really dive into, like, I wanted to post this episode, obviously, so we're all just kind of like familiar with what her life was, what's the whole story.

01:12:48.440 And then for the second part of the month, we're talking a lot more about sort of her, her legacy.

01:12:53.360 And that's what's coming up in the next week's episode.

01:12:55.440 and I'm excited to share that with you and I'm excited to know what you think about this Halloween

01:13:00.380 month episode. What you think about Mary Shelley? Did you know all these facts about her? What did

01:13:06.560 you think about Lord Byron? Should we do a Lord Byron episode? Is he the scariest part of this

01:13:11.640 story? Really? Is that patriarchy? Anyway, my name is Anne Foster and this is the Vulgar History

01:13:18.000 Podcast and I do want to mention to you that I have written a book like Mary Shelley and her

01:13:23.260 mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I am also a lady writer. My book is a nonfiction book. It is

01:13:28.820 called Rebel of the Regency, the Scandal Saga of Carolina Brunswick, Britain's Uncrowned Queen.

01:13:33.560 And it's available now for pre-order. It comes out in just a few months, actually. It comes out

01:13:37.600 in February. And it is a biography of the little known, but very interesting, very audacious

01:13:44.920 Carolina Brunswick, who is a woman who, if you don't know about her, you know, read the book

01:13:49.460 and you'll learn everything about her but it's a fun book it's like how this podcast is like just

01:13:53.580 telling jokes but also having like really good research and just kind of sharing a story about

01:13:58.100 a woman and how the patriarchy made everything really hard for her actually for her it was the

01:14:03.040 british royal family made everything really hard for her anyway you can learn all about the book

01:14:08.100 and you can pre-order the book by going to my website which is rebel of the regency.com

01:14:12.420 there's links there to buy it's for sale right now in like for pre-order in canada and the u.s

01:14:17.580 from any bookstore, literally any bookstore.

01:14:20.160 And I hope to have news soon about people in other countries

01:14:23.040 who will hopefully be able to pre-order it as well.

01:14:26.320 And when you do pre-order the book,

01:14:28.580 just send me a picture of the receipt

01:14:30.000 and you can get a free paper doll of Carolina Brunswick.

01:14:34.000 You can also get a free membership to my sub stack

01:14:36.340 and a free membership to my Patreon

01:14:38.000 just by sharing the picture of the receipt,

01:14:40.660 which you can also do.

01:14:41.460 There's a link to do that at rebeloftheregency.com.

01:14:44.400 One-stop shopping for everything to do with my book.

01:14:47.580 And, yeah, so next episode, coming up, we're going to be talking about Mary Shelley and her goth legacy. And we're just continuing Mary Shelley Month through the whole month of October. Thank you for listening to Vulgar History. And until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.

01:15:05.980 vulgar history is researched scripted and hosted by ann foster that's me editor is christina lumagi 0.99

01:15:14.320 theme music is by the severin duo transcripts of this podcast are available at vulgarhistory.com

01:15:19.980 by aveline malik you can get early ad-free episodes of vulgar history by becoming a paid

01:15:25.100 member of our patreon for as low as one dollar a month at patreon.com slash ann foster writer

01:15:30.540 vulgar history merchandise is available at vulgar history.com slash store for americans

01:15:35.740 and for everyone else at vulgarhistory.redbubble.com.

01:15:39.700 Follow us on social media at vulgarhistorypod

01:15:42.340 and get in touch with me via email at vulgarhistorypod at gmail.com.

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Vulgar History - October 22, 2025

The Wild Life of Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein

Episode Stats

Transcript