“I long more than ever that our house should be quickly ready for the reception of those dear children whom I love so tenderly then there will be a sweet brother and sister for my William, ” she wrote to Shelley. However, she was more than happy to take on her lover’s offspring. Mary had a new child of her own, William. However, on their mother’s death, he decided the time had come to take responsibility for them. According to the laws of nineteenth-century society, the children had always been within Shelley’s control and but for his irregular way of life, Shelley could have claimed custody of them sooner. It seems that the deserted twenty-two year old had killed herself after becoming pregnant by another man, leaving behind her two children by Shelley, Ianthe, and Charles. Sometime in late November or early December 1816, the body of Harriet, Shelley’s first wife was found in the Serpentine River. Mary and Shelley only married so that Shelley could claim custody of his children from his first marriage. Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran, 1819. “Dream that my little baby came to life again-that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived” Mary again confided in her journal, “ I awake & find no baby-I think about the little thing all day.”This theme of loss and the hope of the reanimation of a lost loved one would just over a year later find its way into Frankenstein.

However, at night there was no escape and for Mary, the death-haunted her dreams. “I think of my little dead baby,” Mary wrote in her journal, “This is foolish I suppose yet when I am left alone to my own thought and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point- that I was a mother and am so no longer.” Both she and Shelley tried to take their minds off their loss by reading and study. Unsurprisingly, the baby’s death hit the seventeen-year-old hard. Initially she tried to wake her- but instead, she discovered she was dead. Mary recorded in her journal how on March 5, 1815, she woke during the night to feed the child- only to find her unresponsive.

A premature little girl, she did not live long enough for her parents to name her. On February 22, 1815, Mary and Shelley’s first child was born. Mary Shelley’s story of reanimation was also inspired by grief and loss. Frankenstein was also inspired by personal tragedy as much as imagination and science. Frontispiece to Frankenstein, 1831 edition by Theodore Von Holst.

Mary Shelley by Catherine Reef