Frankenstein was inspired by the suicide of Mary Shelley’s sister, revealed in the book | Mary Shelley

Frankenstein’s monster, as horror fans know, never burst into life with lightning, but was born inside the mind of Mary Shelley during a sad holiday on a mountainside above Geneva. Inspiration came as volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked the sun in the summer of 1816 and he and his friends, including the infamous, “bad boy” poet Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, competing to tell scary stories.

But a new collection of the young author’s personal diaries, out in March, provides strong evidence that, even if the stay in the Alps put a strain on his novel, his imagination was ignited. to something personal and much closer to home.

Shelley’s journals, letters and short stories from this period, published for the first time, reveal that the dark shadow hanging over Frankenstein’s plot is the mysterious suicide of his older half-sister, Fanny Imlay. The poet and Shelley the scholar Fiona Sampsonwho wrote the introduction to the new collection from Manderley Press, convinced that a secret shame lurks behind this tragic death and that it colors the novel. He also believes he found the fake alibi that gave away the game.

The author, still known as Mary Godwin, returned from Switzerland later that year and settled in Bath with her famously married lover, Shelley, and their young child. “Hopeful for a discreet place to live, they are actually at the center of what we know as Jane Austen’s Bath, a place of affectionate gossip,” Sampson told the observers.

Tragedy struck them quickly, and not just once. First, in November, Percy’s 21-year-old wife, Harriet, killed herself, drowning in London’s Serpentine lake. Then, more importantly for the writer, his sister Fanny, the first child of his famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, by the American diplomat, Gilbert Imlay, also killed herself, apparently inexplicably, in a hotel room in Swansea.

Sampson found the original news report on the discovery of the unnamed body in the archived pages of Cambrian Periods when he was researching his 2018 biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Among the clues to the corpse’s identity were the initials of their late mother’s underwear, Wollstonecraft, and a gentleman’s silk handkerchief. For Sampson, however, the main question is why Imlay traveled to Swansea via Bath, instead of directly from London.

“The coach stop was near the Abbey Churchyard, where Shelley and her sister lived. But the day he came to Bath Mary’s journal put an alibi,” said Sampson. “If you decode her diary, which was clearly written for public consumption because of her own literary ambitions and her mother’s fame, she specifically says that she and Percy walked down South Parade for a drawing lessons, the kind of thing he doesn’t usually talk about.”

Sampson suspects a family showdown, possibly prompted by Imlay’s feelings for the poet who is also loved by his brother, now a free man. “We can assume that he met Percy that day because he went to Swansea immediately after the news of his death. There is ample evidence that Fanny spoke to one of them. There is also a suggestion that she has a crush on Percy. Perhaps this is the final rejection. ” Sampson now hears Imlay’s sad voice, often described as “simple”, in the wailing of Frankenstein’s creature: “I am lonely and miserable. Only a man as ugly as I am can love me. “

Rebeka Russell, the publisher of the new collection, wanted to focus on Shelley’s days in Bath. “Mary’s literary reputation is subject to the monster, her husband, who is a bit of a cad really, not to mention her mother’s famous name, of course. But she has a great responsibility, as a brother, a partner, mother and derided as ‘another woman’. This collection shows her as a person with a unique life of her own.”

The twin tragedies changed the understanding of the themes of Frankenstein, now almost a film on Netflix, starring SaltburnJacob Elordi as a monster and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It is often read as a warning about the dangers of science, but as the daughter of Wollstonecraft, England’s most famous early advocate of women’s rights, Shelley was concerned about the impact of motherhood and responsibility on birth. His own mother, after all, did not survive his birth, dying in 1797.

Maureen Lennon, the playwright behind a new musical drama about Wollstonecraft and Shelley, agrees that both women are particularly concerned with the limitations of women. “Fanny has a terrible story,” said Lennon, whose production Maria and the Hyenas opens in Hull next month before the London run at Wilton’s Music Hall. “When Fanny Wollstonecraft was born she wrote a wonderful piece about the fear she felt when she looked at her child. She wanted, she said, that he would be principled and powerful, but also happy. She was afraid that one of these goals must be sacrificed.”

His show, performed at the Pilot Theater and Hull Truck Theater and with songs by musician Billy Nomates (aka Tor Maries), will tell the story of Wollstonecraft’s adventurous career and prompt the thought that he has yet to recognize his most famous child, Mary Shelley. “I wanted to do a show about how we raise girls and young women, because a lot of what Wollstonecraft wrote still feels modern,” Lennon said.