Mary Shelley on Monsters, Grief, & the Spark of Creation
An interview across centuries with the mother of Frankenstein. Can she teach us things about joy?
I read Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus for the first time recently. It was the first book I chose in my mission to increase my attention span (because social media’s done me over). For a few weeks, I’d curl up in my overly-cushioned chair, set my I-shall-pay-attention-this-entire-time timer, and read — not really knowing what to expect.
And I utterly devoured the bloody thing.
Not only has my love for reading been reignited, my attention span healing, and my library consequently growing enormously, but I’ve also been massively inspired.
When she wrote it at just 18, Mary Shelley was living in a world of extreme prejudice; society deemed her lower on the evolutionary ladder compared to men, with no right to vote, or own property, and with a much smaller and therefore very lacking brain compared to men.
And we thought we had it bad.
Not only that, but she was also way too familiar with death and suffering for her age.
Yet, in the space of a single night, she created an entirely new genre.
So, in the efforts of learning more about creativity, resilience, and living joyfully, I decided to interview her.
Of course, Shelley’s been dead for over 180 years, so this is a bit of a challenge. But on my first approach to writing about her for Joyful, I waded through treacle-like efforts to make a readable essay; to make something that didn’t sound like a beige secondary school homework assignment. And then, much like Shelley’s take on creativity (read more on that below), a walk in the woods gave me the spark I needed: I’ll just interview her and see what happens.
Before we dive in, two things you need to know:
I’m not a Mary Shelley scholar, nor a gothic literature expert. I’m just a person who loves gothic literature and Frank’ in particular. Any inaccuracies, falsehoods, or other strange quirks you spot, may I remind you that you’re reading a work of fiction (Mary didn’t actually sit for an interview with me), and the point of this is to inspire in us some of our own gothic (or not) creativity and joy, quirks be damned.
It’s my intention and hopes that this comes across as a love letter to Mary, rather than a parody.
With that in mind…
Let’s grab a drink, shall we?
Shall we start with a cliche? I think it only fitting: it was a dark, and stormy afternoon when I met Mary Shelley. We’d agreed to meet and hunker down in an old pub in the dark recesses of The City of London — not far from The Tower and that lane where the infamous fire started in 1666.
Haunted buildings, creaking floors, and the gloom of a desolate autumn; the scene seemed fitting, when we remember Shelley birthed a monster that would define a genre.
I order a Guinness, Mary a gin over ice. We find a crooked little table in a corner, by a mullioned window that let in a little of the outside gloom. In the centre of the window a candle was lit, melted wax belying the number of candles that came before. Rain on the glass beating a soundtrack to our conversation.
Mary’s hair was weather beaten and wild, her eyes promising a defiance that hadn’t ever left her. She’d shrugged her weather-beaten coat onto the back of her chair, and relaxed back into its cushioned support.
I began, after a sip of my stout, by asking my first question:
Chloe: Can you take us back, Mary? How did Frankenstein really come to life for you?
Mary: It wasn’t ever supposed to, really. I never planned it.
I suppose it started with a man — don’t all good stories? I’d fallen in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite the fact he was already married. He had this wild, wilful, philosophical lust for life, and he was a feminist, which back then was unheard of. My own mother, you know — Mary Wollstonecraft — was one of the first women’s rights advocates. She’d died 11 days after giving birth to me, which perhaps made me even more determined to forward her mission, and a reason I felt utterly magnetised to Percy.
There wasn’t much for us in England: my father had all but cut ties with me after I gave birth to Percy’s child (him still being married); we lost our first, who was premature, although our second — William — stayed strong during the Frankenstein years. So we took ourselves off to Lake Geneva on the advice of my step sister, Claire. She wanted us to meet her fancy man, George — Lord Byron — who was renting a villa by the lake. She was madly in love with this guy, and was so excited to introduce us.
That summer was rotten. You think your volcanic ash cloud of 2010 was bad, this was world-beating. An Indonesian volcano had erupted earlier in the year, and Europe was hit with this terrible weather for months because of it. Crops didn’t grow. The sun didn’t shine. I look back now and think it a fitting backdrop for a monster to be born.
As a consequence of all the gloom, we’d taken shelter in Byron’s villa, where he was staying with his doctor, a young guy named John Polidori. One of those big, fancy places, it was. All pillars and marble and velvet with incredible views of the lake. And Byron himself was… well, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but I didn’t see what Claire saw. Chaos, his place was, his mind likely, too. He was holidaying with a peacock, a monkey, and a dog — you can imagine.
One particular night, after an excess of laudanum and wine, we’d found ourselves reading some volumes of ghost stories we’d found. I remember Percy scared witless — they were truly terrifying. To continue the entertainment, Byron suggested we write ghost stories of our own.
And, I suppose, this was all the permission I needed; the permission to create.
I was a woman, remember, in a time when being a woman wasn’t all that pretty a thing if you wanted to make a mark on the world. I wasn’t a writer, I didn’t have any lauded published collections of poetry like Percy and Byron. But this permission unlocked something in me. John, too.
I remember a vision came to me that night. In it I saw a student of the dark arts kneeling beside his monster. A hideous creation stretched out, stirring with an uneasy, half alive motion.
It terrified me, but I knew this was my story. So I began writing. You know John wrote that night, too? The Vampyre, it was called. Inspired Bram Stoker all those years later. But Percy and Byron created nothing. I think even just an hour or two after Byron’s challenge had been set, they were talking of their next adventure, the idea abandoned completely.
C: What do you think of the creative process for you, that night?
M: It was easy, honestly. Because nothing was expected of me, because there was no pressure, and likely because I’d been given that permission to create, I just wrote. The story poured out of me that night and in the few months that followed.
Percy and Byron, I think, were in a different space. Already published, already celebrated for their work (you know, while we were in Geneva, Byron received a delivery of a woman’s bloody pubic hair in tribute? It made him laugh, I remember. He’d always be getting letters and packets here and there. People truly loved him), — it was almost expected of them to create a masterpiece. I think that pressure forced them off the project.
Of course, they created other masterpieces while in Geneva, but nothing came from that night — I’ve always found that interesting. I think there was a sense of feeling that allowed me to create my monster; I wasn’t overthinking it.
C: You lived through so much darkness in those days. Can you tell us about it? How did it not swallow you whole?
M: The days in Geneva felt like a light in the darkness of my life. Just before the trip, I was convinced my first-born, Clara, had come back to life one night, as she lay by the fire. Perhaps more of her short life survived through Frankenstein than I realised at the time.
My half-sister died by suicide when I was just 19, and my third and fourth children… well, dysentry and malaria took them in the end. I had a fourth child, Percy Florence, who thankfully survived his childhood, but I almost succumbed to a miscarriage just a few years after his birth. Percy forced me to sit — in my lifeless, bloodless state — in baths of ice. Doctors later told me this saved my life, saved it only to experience Percy’s death which happened shortly after my recovery. Nothing prepares you for it. Percy died in a shipwreck — his boat overturned in a freak storm off the coast of Italy. We burned his and his companion’s bodies on the beach, but his heart… well, it didn’t burn. I still have it to this day, wrapped in a silk scarf in a drawer of my desk. Macabre, I know. But it gives me comfort.
[Mary spoke with clear emotion. Tears forming, her voice occasionally shifting in tone. She paused, took a breath, a sip of gin, and watched the raindrops race down the glass of the window before continuing...]
Speaking it all aloud, all at once, feels remarkable. If you’d told me of such losses in your own life, I’d wonder how you’d be standing before me fit and well. But the human condition perseveres.
Frankenstein, and the later revisions I worked on, as well as the other collections I wrote, they became a sort of release. I found myself able to pour these pains and all my grief into this work — they comforted me. This is how I stayed alive, I think. Transmuting, much like Frankenstein with his collection of body parts made alive, my darkness into something more like light. The writing, the creative process, saved me, I think.
[It was clear to me then that emotion is accepted, even welcomed in Shelley’s view of creativity and showing up in the world. She didn’t shy away from it. We allowed this to breathe between us a moment, the candle giving us some softness in our weather-darkening corner.]
C: What was it like writing as a woman in your time?
M: I suppose it was both a challenge and a delight. Women weren’t writers, we were merely mothers and nurses and house-keepers, so nothing much was expected of us — this lack of pressure made creativity easier, I think. And what a joy, to defy convention, to beat the odds, to create words worth writing as someone deemed incapable. That in itself was a total joy.
I do remember the fury I felt, though, when those first audiences assumed Percy had written Frankenstein. I know even some modern scholars take this opinion, too. Would they question it if it was made clear Percy was the author without question? Likely not, but surely a woman couldn’t be the creator of something that became so popular. There was nothing to be done in those days. I had to sit with that discomfort for a while before it became clear the monster (Frankenstein’s, I mean) was mine.
C: What would you say to modern scholars doubting your authorship?
M: I’m not sure I’d dignify their question with an answer, honestly. If you doubt my authorship, you doubt the capacity of a young woman to think monstrously, to dream darkly, to create something vast. And that, perhaps, says more about those questioning it than it does about me.
C: You talk about imagination as a spark — do you think it can also heal?
M: Absolutely. I spoke about that transmutation I found through writing — taking my grief and pain and helping me make sense of it all. And that’s a healing, isn’t it? Allowing us to see the pain — every dark, black, stone-cold side of it, and using it to make something worthwhile, some world or story or word-scape that others can lean into as well as our world-weary selves. The creative process is healing, I firmly believe this. Without my writing, I don’t know if I’d have survived.
C: What do you make of creativity today, when so many of us are exhausted and overworked?
M: I think there’s a sense of loss around creativity these days. We didn’t have life like you, not at all. Back in Byron’s villa in Geneva, we had nothing to fall back on but stories and each other, our imaginations and Byron’s writing challenge. That space allowed us to create and imagine and follow those little pings of ideas into the maze to see where they’d take us. If we’d have had social media or videos or meaningless memes back then, things would irrevocably have been different.
There was more space, more time, a feeling like life stretched out in a different way then. And I think you’ve lost much of that today. Not only is boredom no longer something much tolerated in day to day society, but creativity seems to only be a means to grow followers, or audiences, or make more money. And let me tell you, after being cut off by my own father as well as Percy’s father later in life, and after seeing the wealth Byron amassed — wealth he just frittered away — money doesn’t hold the power you think it does. Find what you need to be comfortable, to feed your babies, yourselves, to buy books, of course. But I think this craving for power and wealth is the real death of creativity.
Create for creation’s sake. Create to transmute those dark places in your mind into something healing, powerful. Create to allow your imagination to expand your life in all directions.
And that, I think, requires more space, more analogue time, and less pressure than modernity allows. If you can challenge that — if you can find the space the time and remove that pressure — I think you’ll give yourself a fighting chance.
C: If you had one piece of advice for those of us trying to live joyfully in chaos, what would it be?
[Mary pauses for a moment, gazing past the guttering candle out into the increasing gloom of the quiet London backstreet. She takes a sip of her gin, gathers her thoughts, and returns to the conversation.]
M: I think the original goths, and I include myself in that family, are the most joyful people. Wasn’t it the Buddhists who reminded us that life is chaos? And I think those connected to their gothic natures remember this; they feel the chaos, the finite, the lack of promises and certainty, and show up for life regardless. They remind themselves often of their pending end, and find a way to transmute their pain into creation.
And it’s this perspective, dark as it may be, twisted and terrifying and heart blackening as it may be, that reminds us of our innate and powerful aliveness in this moment. The decisions open to me might only be that of what drink to pour myself, or they might be bigger — like writing a novel and standing by as its author in a time when women weren’t supposed to out-create men — but regardless, as long as you’re alive, you have agency, you have choice, and in that there’s a serious amount of joy and magic if only we’d allow ourselves to see it.
Mary and I chatted for a little while after my formal questions ended. We spoke about music and books and movies (she was fascinated by the results on IMDB after searching ‘Frankenstein’, and was particularly moved by both Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 and Echo & the Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon). She was one of the most generous and warm-hearted women I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.
I left our meeting and that little table, in that haunted and creaky pub, with a full notebook and a fuller heart. I left with the lessons her experiences and writings teach us: that in darkness and heartache there’s material for making; in the jagged, painful, messy corners of our lives and minds there’s fodder for magic and joy, if only — even when we don’t feel ready — we dare to see it.
Mary had given me a little of her courage, that day, and an enormous appetite for creation of my own.
Thanks, friends, for reading this far into this project of mine. Want to see more interviews with inspirational people? Should I start a series? Let me know in the comments.
Interested in reading Frankenstein? You should, it’s brilliant. Grab your copy here and support local UK bookshops.
Brilliant thanks, I think this could be a series if interviews with women throughout history who impacted the world? X
How interesting! Thanks for writing this ❤️ I am very easily spooked and cannot really cope with the horror/gothic genre, but you definitely made me curious!