How often in the intensity of grief does one instant seem to fill and embrace the universe! — Mary Shelly, September 10, 1822
Each page of Frankenstein reflects the tears of its creator. Mary Shelley’s fantasy of creating life from death is steeped in regret, anger, helplessness, and abandonment. Yet her artistic expression, for all its horror, is an act of healthy grief.
The book’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a vile creator who refuses his creature a parent’s love. The monster’s sense of betrayal is heartbreaking. He compares himself to the devil, adding, “Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
These words are nearly prophetic for Mary. Years later, after much grief, she writes, “What I suffer! What I have suffered! Tears are in my eyes when I think of days, weeks, months, even years spent alone—eternally alone.” Mary is an orphan, a bereaved parent, and a widow, yet she faces life with rare courage and surprising resolve.
Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, dies within ten days of Mary’s birth, casting a pall over the child’s relationship with her father, philosopher William Godwin. He suffers from narcolepsy, occasionally falling into a deep sleep at table, appearing almost dead, only to awaken later. This troubling illness plays out in front of young Mary, who notes with horror the slender line between life and the appearance of death.
This may be one reason that from an early age Mary spends hours at her mother’s grave. It is there, at sixteen, that she frequently meets with the dashing Percy Shelley, aged twenty and married. “Go to the tomb and read,” she writes in her journal. “Go with Shelley to the churchyard.” And it is there that she first professes her love to Shelley on June 26, 1814. Within a month, they run away together to France. Her stepsister, Jane (later called Claire), joins them.
The couple is well-suited. Shelley is impressed by her beauty, independence, and an intelligence that surpasses his own; Mary enjoys his brilliance, passion, and the equality of their exchanges. “I conversed with him,” she writes, “obtained new lights from him, & my mind is satisfied.” But their headstrong departure is too much for Godwin. He never forgives Mary.
The couple returns to London for the birth of their first child. Clara is delivered prematurely on February 22, 1815 in Hillingdon. Busy with a newborn, Mary jots only brief daily notes in her journal: “Nurse the baby, read.” She wakes in the night of March 5 to breastfeed, but the infant is sleeping so quietly Mary does not rouse her. The next morning, March 6, twelve days after Clara’s birth, Mary writes, “Find my baby dead.”
She has recurring, vivid dreams of Clara returning to her. “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived,” she says, adding, “Awake and find no baby.” The loss affects Mary for the rest of her life: “Whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother, and am so no longer.”
Birth of a Monster
It comes as no surprise, then, that a little over a year later, in June, 1816, Mary begins work on a novel of life and death, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The novel famously came about because of a parlor game at the instigation of Lord Byron in Geneva. The summer of 1816 is no summer at all—snows, freezing rains, and days that seem to lose their light by noon. These darkened skies are the result of an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia a year earlier. Byron leases the Villa Diodati in Coligny and invites the Shelleys to take up residence in a nearby cottage. They gather each day in this gloomy atmosphere to discuss poetry, philosophy, and the mysteries of life. Then Byron surprises them.
He suggests that each member of their party compose a ghost story. The idea is greeted with enthusiasm, but soon is cast aside for more interesting pastimes. The results are desultory. Byron produces a meager effort; Shelley nothing at all; Claire does little more than continue the romance she began with Byron in April; and John Polidori starts his short fiction, The Vampyre, published in 1819. But for Mary, the challenge leads to a startling book that speaks to her grief and deepest yearnings.
On June 16, between 2am and 3am, she has a “waking dream . . . with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,” assisted in part by the group’s steady ingestion of wine and laudanum. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” Years later, in her introduction to a revised edition in 1831, she writes that her novel was “making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream,” a vision that has striking similarities to her recurring dreams of restoring infant Clara to life. This connection between the birth of Frankenstein and the death of Mary’s baby is not as tenuous as it may seem.
“Although Frankenstein’s creation of life from dead bodies might seem far removed,” says Fiona Stafford with the University of Oxford, “there is some association, I think, in Mary Shelley’s mind between birth and death.” Biographer Miranda Seymour sees in these dreams a direct link to the novel. “It’s difficult not to think of that when we see her, two years later, writing the story of a creature being quickened into life,” she says. Noted French author Jean-Claude Carrière agrees. “She probably thought a lot about life, about death, about why her child died,” he suggests, adding that having lost a child, Mary was now carrying one borne of her imagination.
Seen in this light, any morbid sentiments in Frankenstein are understandable and surprisingly practical: a sharp reminder of death, the varied aspects of sorrow, and the fragility of existence. “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish,” cries the creature, “is dear to me.” Mary’s monster is articulate, reasoning, and a being of deep and profound feeling. “He’s by far the most eloquent person in the book,” notes Seymour. “Far more so than Frankenstein.”
Yet the creature’s anguish soon turns to hate. Cultural historian Charles Frayling suggests this is the result of rejection by his only father, Frankenstein, without the intercession of a mother. Mary also knows paternal abandonment shorn of comforting maternal love. She dedicates the book to Godwin, but it is not clear if this is a compliment, a satirical critique, or a plea for his affection. Just as her novel is steeped in conflicting emotions, so too, is its author.
Mourners often speak of losing their illusions of control and safety. In fact, clinicians assure us that negative emotions like disillusionment, fear, and regret are characteristic of healthy grief. “When a culture no longer provides adequate forms of mourning,” writes researcher Mary O’Neill on novels like Frankenstein, “these works can act as a means of engaging with bereavement, disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss.” Young Mary is finding ways to express herself in a culture that condemns her.
But her suffering has only begun.
An Onslaught of Grief
On January 24, 1816, Mary gives birth to a son, William, named after her father. They call him “Willmouse.” She and Shelley marry that same year, on December 30, at the church of Saint Mildred in London. Within five months she completes Frankenstein, and none too soon. On September 2, 1817, another daughter, Clara Everina, is born. The girl dies of dysentery shortly after her first birthday, on September 24, 1818, in Venice. Then while the grieving family is in Rome, on June 7, 1819, three-year-old Willmouse dies of malaria. They bury him in a local Protestant cemetery, but the heartbroken father insists that his son’s spirit does not lie in a tomb:
—if a thing divine Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine Is thy mother’s grief and mine. Where art thou, my gentle child? Let me think thy spirit feeds, With its life intense and mild, The love of living leaves and weeds Among these tombs and ruins wild
Five months after William dies, on November 12, 1819, another son is born: Percy Florence. Three years later, Mary is again pregnant but miscarries on June 16, 1822—six years to the day of her waking dream that led to Frankenstein. Blood loss nearly kills her. Then, as she recovers, on July 8, Percy Shelley and retired army officer Edward Williams drown in the Gulf of Spezia. “Great God! No, he is not there, he is with me, about me,” Mary cries when she sees the box containing her husband’s ashes. “Life of my life, and soul of my soul; if his divine spirit did not penetrate mine I could not survive to weep thus.”
Shelley is buried near his son Willmouse and his friend John Keats in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. But like her husband, Mary does not believe her loved ones lie in the cold ground.
She senses her three children, Shelley, and his friend are still with her. She insists that in death “a wild and beautiful spirit” lives on with “a beauty of its own.” She relates that once, when she dozes off, Edward’s spirit comes to pass a few hours with her, though he cannot stay long.
Near the first memorial day of her husband’s death, in July, 1823, Mary composes an elegiac poem of despair and hope, “The Choice.” It is her most personal yet strikingly formal piece. Arnold Markley with Penn State University notes that it tackles head-on the central issue of “how to have a continuing intercourse in spirit with a man who can no longer be an earthly lover.”
Mary opens the poem with a prayer to her husband, candidly recalling the struggles their relationship endured and asking forgiveness for her “cold neglect.” This kind of honesty is especially helpful after a loss: Mary’s lament anchors her love in reality. She also mourns their second daughter, Clara Everina, who rests in the Protestant section of the Lido Cemetery, Venice, and their son, Willmouse:
A happy Mother first I saw this sun, Beneath this sky my race of joy was run. First my sweet girl, whose face resembled his, Slept on bleak Lido, near Venetian seas. Yet still my eldest-born, my loveliest, dearest, Clung to my side, most joyful then when nearest. . . . His spoils were strewed beneath the soil of Rome, Whose flowers now star the dark earth near his tomb: It’s airs and plants received the mortal part, His spirit beats within his Mother’s heart. Infant immortal! chosen for the sky! No grief upon thy brow’s young purity Entrenched sad lines, or blotted with its might The sunshine of thy smile’s celestial light;— The image shattered, the bright spirit fled, Thou shin’st the evening star among the dead.
Mary includes sorrowful lines for Shelley’s friend Edward, and for Allegra, the daughter of her stepsister Claire and Lord Byron. She speaks reverently of nature, where her husband is now free to wander the vast gulf waters. “The spirit waits with this in our far home,” she writes,
The sad revolving year has not allayed The poison of these bleeding wounds, or made The anguish less of that corroding thought Which had with grief each single moment fraught
Modern readers may dismiss Mary’s sorrow as negative or brooding, but often such moments of remembrance have a positive impact on the bereaved. Creative expressions provide a means to mourn openly. They offer meaning and gentle memory. Mary will need both.
Writing Her Wounds
Now Mary is alone with three-year-old Percy Florence—an ostracized widow and a bereaved mother of three dead children. But she does not give up: “I no longer enjoy, but I love. Death cannot deprive me of that living spark which feeds on all given it, and which is now triumphant in sorrow. I love, and shall enjoy happiness again. I do not doubt that; but when?”
I am struck by the similarities between Mary’s question and the psalmist’s lament, “How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” Her plea also calls to mind a poem by another nineteenth-century author that wrote about grief, Christina Rossetti:
Yet a little while Heaven is not far, tho’ far the sky Overarching earth and main. It takes not long to live and die, Die, revive, and rise again. Not long: how long? Oh, long re-echoing song! O Lord, how long?
Mary’s heart is all wounds, she says, but she anticipates a day of reunion after death “when I forget a thousand memories and griefs that are as yet alive and burning.” She keeps locks of Clara’s and William’s hair in her writing desk for the rest of her life. Such keepsakes are normal and can be helpful when waves of grief return over the years. “O my god—what a lot is mine,” Mary mourns anew on June 7, 1836, William’s seventeenth memorial day. “Tracked by disappointment & unutterable wretchedness—blow after blow—my heart dies within me.”
Today much of Mary’s work is acknowledged as noteworthy: Frankenstein is a staple in many college courses. One of her lesser-known short stories, “The Mourner,” written in 1829, depicts a daughter’s guilt after her father drowns. She weaves insights on family, love, hope, and death into a poignant tale on the complicated nature of grief. She touches upon similar themes in “The Dream.” This too is healthy. Writing “provides us with the metaphors to experience ongoing attachment,” observes psychologist and grief research pioneer Margaret Stroebe, “to help us understand and find a place for the loss.” Mary does just that.
Her novels, Frankenstein, Matilda, and The Last Man, reflect the author’s life of abandonment and grief. In each book, her characters lose loved ones and end up alone.
Mary begins Matilda on November 9, 1819, five months after William’s death and just a few days before the birth of Percy Florence. “When I wrote Matilda, miserable as I was,” she confesses, “the inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily.” This is also true with her 1826 book, The Last Man, which according to Constance Walker with Carleton College is best understood in the context of parental bereavement. Writing the novel is not easy for Mary.
Throughout 1824, she wrestles with grief and painful loneliness. “The last man!” Mary exclaims on May 14. “Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.” The next day she receives news that “dear capricious fascinating Albe [Lord Byron],” a friend of many years, particularly that summer in Geneva of 1816 when Frankenstein was born, has died in Greece.
Within a few weeks she is writing again, “a pleasure not a task . . . as I pour forth my soul upon paper.” But The Last Man is not published until 1826. It takes all of Mary’s powers to finish it and even then she feels there isn’t time to give the book its due. Had she known this, she admits, “I should never have had the courage to begin.” And yet for many readers, this is her finest novel.
The Last Man is redolent of resignation and resolve. Mary writes of a pandemic that nearly extinguishes all life on earth. In the end, after losing everyone he loves, her titular character, Lionel Verney, sets out in a small boat with only a dog and books as companions. “Neither hope nor joy are my pilots,” Mary writes in the voice of her protagonist. Under the sun, the moon, and the eyes of angels, God, and the spirits of the dead, the boat sails on, its captain longing for “some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day’s fulfillment.” Two hundred years later, modern therapists have a name for Mary’s insight: meaning reconstruction.
Grief expert and psychology professor at the University of Memphis, Robert Neimeyer, suggests that authors like Mary Shelley express “the extent to which our most intimate sense of self is rooted (and uprooted) in our shifting relationships with others.” Death disrupts our lives in the most fundamental way. We feel a strong need to come to terms with the sudden abyss that loss creates. This normal reaction is called meaning reconstruction, which includes putting the death in perspective as well as finding some purpose to our lives ahead. In this way, Mary’s writing serves as both lament and adjustment.
But it’s not all doom and misery, observes Thomas Bauer, a specialist in grief-related poetry at the University of Münster. Prose and verse often contain an “artistic and playful element,” he writes, that facilitates healthy mourning. Many of Mary’s stories have moments of whimsy that help to express pain and provide a means of coping. This in turn offers relief from passive suffering. Creation in honor of our dead allows us to give voice to our love for them through sorrow and memory. “A poem (or any other work of art),” Bauer concludes, “is a means to break the speechlessness of death.”
Mary writes with gentle pathos, patience, and calm—traits common to those who have endured terrible loss. Her observations on life’s many ironies offer catharsis for author and reader alike. Yet in her originality and considerable wit she is more than a pioneer of science fiction or horror. Frankenstein closes with Victor dead in a frozen wasteland as his creation wanders alone into darkness. But Mary’s story does not end in the starless black.
She and Percy Florence return to England after Shelley drowns. There Mary often walks alone. Solitude is difficult, yes, but also helpful. “My grief was active, striving, expectant,” she confesses. “I sounded the depths of my own nature, magnificent, deep, pathetic, wild, and exalted.” She does not turn from these dark depths. Rather, her sorrows, and her words, are borne of love. “It is better to grieve than not to grieve,” Mary assures us across the centuries. “Grief at least tells me that I was not always what I am now. I was once selected for happiness; let the memory of that abide by me.”
Image credit: Richard Rothwell, “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” (1840) via Wikimedia Commons
