There could be a mourning behind the birth of Frankenstein

“I am alone and unhappy. Only an ugly person like me could love me.” Behind Frankenstein’s lament there may be a bitter truth. New background information is about to be revealed about the book published in 1818, then a cult film in the history of cinema which turned 50 in 2024.

Frankenstein’s monster, as horror fans know, did not come to life with a bolt of lightning, but was born in the mind of writer Mary Shelley during a gloomy holiday on a mountain in Geneva. Inspiration came when volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked the sun that summer of 1816 and she and her friends, including the infamous “bad boy” poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, they competed in telling scary stories.

But a new one collection of personal diaries of the young author, due out in March, provides strong evidence that, although his stay in the Alps created the dark atmosphere of his novel, his imagination was fired by something personal and much more intimate.

Shelley’s diaries, letters and short stories from this period, published together for the first time, reveal that the dark shadow hanging over the plot of Frankenstein is the mysterious suicide of the older stepsister Fanny Imlay. The poet and Shelley scholar, Fiona Sampson, who wrote the introduction to the new collection from Manderley Press, is convinced that behind this sad death lies a secret shame that has colored the novel.

The author, at the time still known as Mary Godwin, she had returned from Switzerland later that year and took up lodgings in Bath with her infamous married lover, Shelley, and their child. “Hoping to find somewhere discreet to live, they actually found themselves in the heart of what we know as Jane Austen’s Bath, a place of genteel gossip,” Sampson told the Observer.

Tragedy strikes them quickly, and not just once. First, in November, Percy’s abandoned twenty-one-year-old wife, Harriet, killed herself by drowning in London’s Serpentine Lake. Then, even more significantly for the writer, his sister Fanny also killed herself, apparently inexplicably, in a hotel room in Swansea.

Sampson found the original news story of the discovery of the unnamed body in the archived pages of the Cambrian Times while researching her 2018 biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Among the clues to the identity of the body were signed undergarments of their late mother, Wollstonecraft, and a gentleman’s silk handkerchief. For Sampson, however, the key question is why Imlay traveled to Swansea via Bath, rather than directly from London.

Sampson suspects that it is a family showdown, probably provoked by Imlay’s feelings for the poet his sister also loved, now a free man. “We can hypothesize that she met Percy that day because he immediately left for Swansea upon hearing the news of her death. There is much evidence that Fanny had spoken to one of them. There is also the hypothesis that she had a crush on Percy. Perhaps this was the final rejection.”

Rebeka Russell, editor of the new collection, wanted to focus on the days Shelley spent in Bath. “Mary’s literary reputation was submerged by the monsterby her husband, who was a bit of a scoundrel, not to mention the great name of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of feminism. But she carried with her many responsibilities, as a sister, as a partner, as a mother and as the reviled one “other woman”. This collection shows her as someone with an extraordinary life.”