Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are taking
on a figure who I think for most people is maybe
the most famous one hit wonder in all of literature.
You have to be talking about Mary Shelley. Exactly.
Mary Shelley. Most of us you know that we can
probably list two facts about her. She was married
to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and she wrote
Frankenstein. And that's it. And that's pretty
much it. The story ends there for a lot of people.
But to just. boil her down to that. It does her
such a huge disservice. I mean, when you say
Mary Shelley, you immediately see the monster,
right? The stitches, the lightning, the castle.
Of course. But focusing just on Frankenstein
means we miss, what, almost 50 years of this.
breathtakingly productive and professional life.
So that's our mission for this deep dive then,
to get past the monster. Exactly. We want to
understand the full picture. Her completely chaotic
and radical upbringing, the almost unbelievable
tragedy that she lived through, and the fact
that she was a professional writer who wrote
six other novels, short stories, travelogues,
and these massive five -volume biographies. And
this isn't just a literary history lesson. Mary
Shelley's life is this incredible window into
one of the biggest intellectual clashes in history.
You've got the Enlightenment all about cold,
hard reason, which was championed by her father.
And then you have romanticism, fiery, individual,
all about me, which was embodied by her husband.
And she's standing right in the middle of that
collision. Right. And she uses her life and her
work to critique both sides. She gives us these.
profound aha moments about ambition, about creativity,
and really about survival. She was this ultimate
outlaw who found her genius in surprisingly cooperation
and family. OK, so to get Mary Shelley, you really
have to start with her parents. She was born
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, 1797. And
her parents were I mean, they were basically
radical royalty. They were the intellectual celebrity
power couple of the 1790s. Absolute giants. Their
lives were already making headlines and their
ideas were, you know, actively trying to reshape
the world. And you really can't overstate how
important that lineage was. Her mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft. The author of A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman. A foundational feminist
text. But this revolutionary start is just immediately
hit with tragedy. A profound tragedy. Wollstonecraft
died just 11 days after Mary was born. 11 days.
Yeah. from puerperal fever. We hear that term
a lot in history, puerperal fever. Can we just
pause on what that actually was? It wasn't just,
you know, getting sick. No, not at all. It was
terrifyingly common. We call it childbed fever
now. It was a systemic infection, usually streptococcal,
that would just tear through a woman's body after
childbirth. And this was before anyone understood
germ theory. Right. So medically speaking, Mary's
arrival in the world directly led to her mother's
departure from it. That's, I mean, that's a heavy
psychological burden for a child to inherit.
And then, as if that wasn't enough, her father,
the philosopher William Godwin, makes it all
so much worse. He does. He publishes this book,
Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, in 1798. It was meant to be
a tribute. But it backfired spectacularly. Why?
Because Godwin was so committed to his philosophy
of complete, brutal honesty, he revealed everything
about Wollstonecraft's life. Her previous affairs,
the fact that Mary's older half -sister, Fanny
Imlay, was illegitimate. And for late 18th century
society, that was just... It was completely shocking,
an absolute scandal. The woman who had championed
reason was suddenly recast as this libertine,
and baby Mary was, you know, tarred with that
same brush from birth. So the world is condemning
her mother, but at home, her father is telling
her to cherish her mother's memory. It's this
incredible contradiction she's... raised in.
And Godwin himself was a philosophical anarchist
who, at least at first, thought marriage was
a repressive monopoly. So her whole world is
built on defiance. But all that high -minded
philosophy didn't exactly pay the bills, did
it? Not even close. It was a house of intellectual
extremes and financial chaos. Godwin was always,
always in debt. Which is why he remarries in
1801. He marries a neighbor, Mary Jane Claremont.
And by all accounts, this was not a good move
for Mary. She grew to absolutely detest her stepmother.
Godwin's friends called her quarrelsome. And
Mary was convinced she favored her own children,
especially her daughter, Claire Claremont. So
it's this emotionally tense home, constantly
worried about debt collectors. But at the same
time, she's getting this education that was,
well, almost unheard of. for a girl at the time.
Absolutely. The tension sort of fueled her. Her
father tutored her directly in history, politics,
literature, and the people who visited their
house. I mean, can you imagine Samuel Taylor
Coleridge sitting in your living room and reading
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner out loud to you
as a teenager? It sounds like a dream for an
aspiring writer. And former U .S. Vice President
Aaron Burr was a visitor, too. It was this incredible
intellectual hothouse. And Godwin saw the genius
in her, didn't he? Oh, he did. He wrote about
her when she was 15, calling her singularly bold,
somewhat imperious, and active of mind. He said
her desire of knowledge is great and her perseverance
almost invincible. But that was always set against
this backdrop of financial disaster. The family
publishing firm failed, which just plunged them
deeper and deeper into debt. So she's not just
learning about political theory. She's learning
about the harsh reality of poverty, the constant
threat of creditors. It must have been suffocating.
Which is probably why the time she spent away
in Scotland was so important for her. Right.
She gets to stay with the Baxter family near
Dundee in 1812 and 1813. And it was this crucial
escape. It gave her the space to breathe away
from the chaos in London. She said later in the
introduction to Frankenstein that it was there
beneath the trees or on the bleak sides of the
woodless mountains that her true compositions,
the airy flights of my imagination, were born
and fostered. it's amazing the seeds of the world's
greatest horror story were planted not in some
dark spooky castle but in the open wild landscapes
of scotland that need for escape for a new reality
led her directly into the next and probably most
scandalous chapter of her life And that chapter
is, of course, Percy Bysshe Shelley. This wasn't
just a teenage romance. It was an explosion.
It was always going to be a scandal. Oh, absolutely.
Percy was, you know, a kind of intellectual rock
star, a brilliant poet, and a huge fan of Godwin's
radical ideas. But just like Godwin, he was always
broke. He was 21. She was just 16. And he was
married. To a woman named Harriet. Plus, he'd
completely alienated his own wealthy aristocratic
family with his radical politics so he couldn't
get his hands on his inheritance. He was running
on pure intellectual passion and basically no
money. A perfect match for the Godwin household
then. You could say that. The connection was
immediate and deeply symbolic. They supposedly
fell in love meeting in secret at her mother's
grave in St. Pancras Old Church. That location,
it feels so deliberate. It's almost like a statement.
It was absolutely a statement. She wasn't just
falling for a man. She was falling for the living
embodiment of her parents' radical ideals. She
was acting out Godwin's old theory that marriage
was a repressive monopoly. By choosing a married
man, she was staging her own philosophical rebellion.
A rebellion by a 16 -year -old. And when they
elope in July 1814, they even take her stepsister,
Claire Claremont, with them. Mary called it acting
in a novel. It sounds like a grand romantic adventure.
But the reality hit them almost immediately.
How so? They get to France, and they're traveling
through a country that she said was recently
ravaged by war. She wasn't just on a honeymoon.
She was seeing real suffering, real poverty.
She wrote that it gave a sting to my detestation
of war. The utopian fantasy meets reality, and
then when they get back to England, it gets even
worse. Full force. They're broke. ostracized,
and her own father, William Godwin, whose ideas
inspired the whole thing, refuses to see her.
The hypocrisy is just staggering. It is. He could
write the theory, but he couldn't handle the
reality when it affected his own reputation and
finances. It was a devastating rejection for
Mary. She gets pregnant. Percy is constantly
away dodging creditors. And she has to deal with
the fact that he's still celebrating the birth
of his son with his estranged wife, Harriet.
Yes. And on top of all that, you have Claremont,
her stepsister, who was always there and was
very likely Percy's lover at some point. The
jealousy and isolation for Mary must have been
incredible. It's a pressure cooker. But the emotional
strain was nothing compared to the tragedy that
was coming. No. The true devastation was just
relentless loss. In February 1815, she gives
birth to a daughter prematurely. The baby dies.
And this just sends her into a deep depression.
A complete psychological rupture. Her diary entry
from that time, it's just one of the saddest
things. She writes to a friend, my baby is dead,
will you come to see me? I'm no longer a mother
now. To lose your first child like that is unimaginable,
and it was only the beginning. It was. The losses
just kept coming. In late 1816, two suicides,
back to back. First, her half -sister. Fanny
Imlay, Wollstonecraft's other daughter. She took
her own life with laudanum in October. And we
should remember, laudanum and opium and alcohol
tincture was everywhere. It was the readily available
tool of despair. Exactly. And then, just two
months later, in December, Percy's estranged
wife, Harriet, drowns herself in the Serpentine
River in Hyde Park. Two women, both so closely
tied to their lives, dead by suicide in two months.
It's an overwhelming amount of trauma. They marry
very quickly after that, partly for legal reasons,
but that doesn't stop the pain. No, the legal
nightmare just continues. Yeah. In March 1817,
the court decides what to do with Percy's children
from his marriage to Harriet. And they rule against
him. They find him morally unfit. His atheism.
his scandalous lifestyle, they strip him of his
parental rights and give the children to a clergyman's
family. So by 1817, Mary Shelley is not yet 20
years old, and she has already lived through
more loss and scandal than most people do in
a lifetime. An almost unimaginable crucible of
pain. And yet somehow, this is the exact moment
when her greatest creative act is born. Which
takes us back just a little bit to the summer
of 1816 in Geneva. Mary, Percy, and their second
child, William. who they nicknamed Wilmouse.
They all travel there with Clara Claremont, who's
now, by the way, pregnant with Lord Byron's child.
So it's this traveling circus of romantic poets
and their very complicated lives. They all rent
houses near Lake Geneva, along with Byron and
his doctor, John Polidori. And the image we have
of a beautiful, romantic summer couldn't be more
wrong. This was 1816, the famous year without
a summer. That's such a critical piece of context.
They didn't know it, but a huge volcanic eruption
in Indonesia the year before, Mount Tambora,
had thrown so much ash into the atmosphere that
it completely messed up the global climate. Europe
was cold, dark, and endlessly rainy. Mary herself
called it a wet, ungenial summer. So they're
all trapped indoors, bored. What do you do? You
read German ghost stories. And then... Lord Byron,
ever the showman, says, hey, let's all write
our own ghost story. And for Mary, who is surrounded
by these literary giants, Byron, Shelley, that
must have been terrifying. She felt immense pressure.
She said she had to give a mortifying negative
every morning when they asked her if she'd come
up with anything yet. The anxiety of influence.
But the breakthrough comes from a conversation
they have one night. Late night discussion. It
turned to the very nature of life. Could we reanimate
a corpse? Could we cheat death? And they talked
about galvanism. Yes, which we have to understand
was the cutting edge science of the day. The
idea that you could use animal electricity to
make dead muscle tissue move. It wasn't magic.
It was, you know, a plausible scientific theory
at the time. They were basically debating the
ethics of playing God, but with real science
to back it up. Exactly. And Mary goes to bed
that night, but she can't sleep. Her mind is
just racing. And then she has what she called
her waking dream. And astronomers have actually
pinpointed this moment. They have. To between
2 and 3 a .m. on June 16, 1816. So what did she
see in this vision? This is the birth of the
monster. It's this perfect Gothic image. She
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he'd put together. She sees
the body stir, this hideous phantasm of a man
showing signs of life. And she realized, as terrifying
as it was, that was her story. And she starts
writing what she thinks will be a short story.
But with Percy's encouragement, it just grows
and grows and becomes the novel. Frankenstein
or the modern Prometheus. Which brings us to
the shadow that has hung over the book for 200
years. The authorship controversy. Yes. It was
published anonymously with a preface by Percy
dedicated to her father. So, of course, everyone
just assumed a man must have written it. Probably
Percy. It was a combination of sexism and, frankly,
the sheer audacity of the book's ideas. People
just couldn't believe a 19 -year -old woman could
write something so profound. And Mary had to
keep defending herself, didn't she? She was clear
that the core idea was hers, but she gave Percy
credit for his incitement. That's the key word.
He was her encourager, her editor, her cheerleader.
But the story, the monster, the warning, that
was all hers. But for a long time, some scholars
argued he was basically a minor collaborator.
So how did we finally settle this? Modern science,
really. Textual analysis. We can now look at
the original handwritten notebooks. The ones
in the Bodleian Library. Exactly. And you can
see her handwriting and then his edits in the
margins. And it's definitive. And what did the
experts who studied them, like Fiona Sampson,
say? They say his contributions were no more
than what most publishers, editors have provided
new. or old authors. He fixed grammar. He clarified
some sentences. He was a good line editor. So
he polished it. He didn't create it. Not even
close. The intellectual core, the critique of
masculine ambition, the philosophical depth that
is 100 % Mary Shelley. The monster was hers and
hers alone. So she has this moment of incredible
creative triumph in Geneva, but it's almost immediately
followed by another period of just devastating
sorrow. In 1818, the Shelleys decide to leave
Britain for good. They go to Italy thinking they're
escaping the debt, the scandals. Yeah. You know,
starting a new grand romantic life. But that's
not what they found. Not at all. What they found
was a roving existence that was just blighted
by one loss after another. They were constantly
moving Venice, Rome, Naples, Pisa, but they couldn't
outrun grief. And the grief came in the form
of losing more children. It's just staggering.
First, their little daughter Clara dies in Venice
in September of 1818. Okay. Then their son, William
Wilmouse, the one born after Geneva, he dies
of malaria in Rome in June 1819. So that's three
children she's lost now. Three. She falls into
this deep, isolating depression. She wrote about
the terrible irony of it all, that she came to
Italy for Percy's health, and instead the climate
killed her children. There's a letter she wrote
that is just, it's brutal. May you. Never know
what it is to lose two only and lovely children
in one year, to watch their dying moments, and
then at last to be left childless and forever
miserable. I can't even imagine. And yet she
keeps writing through it all. The writing becomes
her solace, her way of processing it. She writes
a novella called Matilda during this time. And
it seems to speak directly to her trauma. It
does. It's about a young woman who is just relentlessly
punished by fate, simply for inspiring an incestuous
love in her father. It's this dark... feminist
critique of a patriarchal world that destroys
women. It was so dark it wasn't even published
in her lifetime. And during this dark period
in Italy, there's also this really bizarre mystery
that pops up. The story of Elena Adelaide Shelley.
This is one of the great puzzles for Shelley
biographers. Basically, between 1818 and 1820,
they're being blackmailed by some former servants.
Okay. And these servants reveal that in Naples,
in February 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley officially
registered a two -month -old baby girl named
Delana Adelaide Shelley as his child with Mary
Shelley. With Mary. But she was grieving and
pregnant almost that entire time. What did she
say about this? She was absolutely adamant she
was not the mother. She called Naples a paradise
inhabited by devils. The whole episode seems
to have been this bewildering, corrupt nightmare
for her. So what's the theory? Who was this child?
Nobody knows for sure. Maybe Percy adopted her.
Maybe she was his child with Claire's nurse or
even with Claire herself. We just don't know.
The point is, Mary denied it completely. It just
shows the level of chaos and secrets she was
living with. Total instability. And the tragedy
just continues. Elena, the mystery baby. dies
in Naples in June of 1820. So the only stability
they find is with the birth of their son, Percy
Florence, their only child to survive to adulthood.
Yes, he's born in late 1819. But their time in
Italy is racing towards its final, ultimate tragedy.
In June of 1822, Mary herself almost dies. A
miscarriage. She was bleeding so heavily that
Percy, in a moment of panic and genius, puts
her in a bath of ice to stop the bleeding. The
doctor later said it saved her life. And then
just one month later, July 8th, 1822. The stability
she fought so hard for is just wiped out. Percy
is out sailing on his boat. The dawn won, a storm
hits, and he drowns. The image of his body being
cremated on the beach by Byron and Trelawney
with his heart that supposedly wouldn't burn,
it's like the dramatic final scene of that whole
romantic era. It's the end of a radical life,
in a way. She returns to England in 1823, a widow,
a single mother, determined to raise her son
and live by her pen. But she's immediately thrown
into a new kind of battle. A professional one.
And a financial one. She's up against her father
-in -law, Sir Timothy Shelley. A conservative
aristocrat who despised everything about his
son. Hated it all. He refuses to even meet Mary.
And he gives her an ultimatum. He'll provide
an allowance for her and her son, but only if
she promises never to publish a biography or
any detailed account of Percy's life. He's basically
trying to erase his son's radical legacy. Exactly.
And this act of censorship forces Mary into this
impossible choice between financial survival
for her son and telling the truth about the man
she loved. It shaped the entire rest of her career.
And this is where the story really pivots, because
Mary Shelley, the widow, doesn't just retreat.
She becomes this incredibly hardworking professional
author. For decades. This is not someone resting
on her laurels. She's a single working mom writing
to pay the bills. In 1830, she even sold the
copyright to a new edition of Frankenstein for
just 60 pounds. Wow. Her output was huge. She
wrote six more novels after Frankenstein. Valperga,
The Last Man, which is an amazing book. We'll
get to that. Perkin Warbeck, Lador, Faulkner.
And she was constantly writing short stories
for the popular magazines of the day, travel
writing. But the work that really shows her status
as a professional intellectual isn't the fiction,
is it? No. This is the part of her career that
gets completely overlooked. She wrote five enormous
volumes of biographies for something called Lardner's
Cabinet Cyclopedia. So what was the Cabinet Cyclopedia?
Why was this such a big deal? Think of it as
like... the high -end Wikipedia of its day. It
was this massive project to bring serious history
and science to the growing Victorian middle class.
It was hugely popular with print runs around
4 ,000 copies per volume. So for her to write
five volumes of biographies of eminent men from
Italy, Spain, France, that's a huge undertaking.
It required incredible research, translation,
synthesis. It established her not just as a novelist,
but as a serious public intellectual. a professional
woman of letters, which was rare. What's so fascinating
to me, though, is that the themes in her work
seem to be a direct challenge to the very ideas
that the men in her life championed. Yeah, it
is the absolute core of her genius. She lived
through this radical, individualistic experiment,
and her writing is a lifelong critique of its
failures. Let's start with Victor Frankenstein.
He's not the hero. Not at all. He's the critique.
He's like Prometheus or Satan from Milton, this
great, ambitious rebel. But his ambition... His
relentless pursuit of knowledge with no thought
for the consequences. It's a self -delusion,
as she calls it. It is. He abandons his family,
his community, and most importantly, his own
creation. The monster is a monster because Victor
fails in his domestic and social duty of care.
She's condemning that kind of selfish, masculine
genius. And she takes that critique to a global
scale with her 1826 novel, The Last Man. An incredible
and incredibly bleak apocalyptic novel. It's
about a global plague that wipes out humanity.
And it's a profoundly disenchanted commentary
on the whole age of revolution. She has characters
in it that are pretty clearly based on Byron
and Percy Shelley. Oh, yes. And when the apocalypse
comes, all their grand, lofty ideals and political
theories are completely useless. So she's basically
rejecting her father's core belief, the Enlightenment
faith in progress, that humanity is always getting
better. She's rejecting it completely. She's
showing that humanity has no control in the face
of nature and fate. After seeing her own utopia
crumble, she seemed to decide that individual
fervor just leads to disaster. So if she's tearing
down those masculine ideals, what does she propose
instead? What's her solution? It was consistent
across all her work, and it was born from her
grief. She argued that cooperation and sympathy,
the values usually practiced by women in the
family, were the only real way to reform society.
So it's not grand revolution, it's small -scale
domestic reform. Exactly. Her later novels are
all about this. Ludor, for example, is a direct
attack on patriarchal culture and a plea for
equal education for men and women. And Faulkner
is the one where the heroine's agenda finally
wins. Yes. It's the only one where her moral
vision triumphs and the men around her are guided
to express compassion, sympathy and generosity.
She was using fiction as a political tool. And
she didn't just write about these principles.
She lived them, even when it was risky. This
is such a crucial part of her story. She was
constantly helping women who society had cast
out. The most amazing example is Isabel Robinson.
and Mary Diana Dodds. Tell us about them. Mary
Diana Dodds was a writer who seems to have been
a lesbian and lived as a man. Society, of course,
would not tolerate this. So what did Mary Shelley
do? She financed them. She helped them get false
passports so they could escape to France and
live together as husband and wife with Dodds
taking the male identity of Walter Sholto Douglas.
This was a hugely risky... radical act of solidarity.
Wow. She was putting her money and her reputation
on the line. Absolutely. And this brings us back
to that huge editorial challenge she faced. Sir
Timothy's ban on a biography of Percy. Right.
So she has to find another way to tell his story.
And she does it brilliantly. She agrees to edit
the poetical works of Percy Buscelli in 1839.
And this project becomes the canonizing event
that saves his reputation for a new Victorian
audience. How does she do it? How does she sell
this radical atheist to the Victorians? By breaking
the rules. She gets around the biography ban
by writing these extensive, beautiful biographical
notes for all the poems. And she very carefully
frames him. She sanitizes him. She does. She
portrays him as this gentle, lyrical poet whose
radicalism came from a deep, almost childlike
sympathy for others, not from dangerous ideology.
She... shapes his image for survival. Did she
have to actually cut his work? She did. With
his most radical early poem, Queen Mab, she initially
cut out all the fiercely atheistic parts. She
was terrified they would destroy his reputation
and, by extension, her son's future. But she
did restore them later, right? She did, and it
shows her courage. Because when a later, cheaper
edition came out with the atheist passages restored,
her publisher was actually prosecuted for blasphemous
libel. Unbelievable. Just shows the tightrope
she was walking. Preserving the truth of the
man she loved while fighting for her own family's
survival, it was an editorial masterpiece of
political calculation. But despite all of this,
I mean, decades of work as a novelist, a biographer,
an editor, for more than a century after she
died in 1851, she'd just forgotten. Or worse,
misremembered. She was just Percy's wife who
wrote that one monster book. Right. A prolific,
brilliant career just reduced to a fit note.
And sadly, That was actively encouraged by her
own family. Her son, Percy Florence, and his
wife, Jane. Yes. They went on this deliberate
campaign to Victorianize her. They censored her
letters and diaries. They destroyed documents.
They basically scrubbed away all the radical,
messy, chaotic parts of her life to make her
seem respectable. They even controlled where
she was buried. They did. She had wanted to be
buried with her parents in a radical graveyard
at St. Pancras, but they thought the place was
dreadful. and they buried her in Bournemouth
instead, physically separating her from her radical
roots. And Kersey's old friends, like Edward
Trelawney, they didn't really help her reputation
either, did they? No, they often downplayed her
intelligence, cast doubt on whether she really
wrote Frankenstein all by herself. She was effectively
sidelined by history written by men. Until a
year after her death, when her son opens up her
old box desk, and what they find inside is just...
It's so incredibly poignant. It is. It's like
a physical archive of her life's love and sorrow.
What was in there? Locks of her dead children's
hair, a notebook she and Percy had shared, and
then a small silk parcel. Inside was some of
Percy's ashes and the remains of his heart, the
part that wouldn't burn on the beach. Wow. And
it was all wrapped up inside a copy of his poem,
Adonais. It's the perfect metaphor for her life.
She carried the literal heart of her radical
past with her, but she kept it hidden away, safe
in a box, while she navigated the public world.
It's beautiful, isn't it? And thankfully, in
the modern era, we've finally opened that box,
metaphorically speaking. Starting in the 1970s
with the rise of feminist literary criticism.
Exactly. Scholars started asking, what about
the women's voices that have been silenced? And
they rediscovered Mary Shelley, not just the
author of Frankenstein, but the whole woman.
And now her other works are getting the attention
they deserve. The Last Man, her travel writing,
those huge biographies. And we now see her as
a major romantic figure in her own right. A brilliant
intellectual with a powerful, consistent political
voice who not only participated in the revolution,
but crucially survived it. A survivor who chronicled
the failures of the brilliant doomed men who
surrounded her and offered a different way forward.
Hashtag tag tag outro. So when you put it all
together, what do you see? You see this woman
who was born into this radical, chaotic world.
With the competing ideas of her parents. Reason
versus individualism. And she takes that life
and uses it to write literature that is a constant
critique of the very egotism and unchecked ambition
she saw in the men she loved. She loved the genius,
but she deeply, deeply distrusted the philosophy.
And she was a master synthesizer. She could pull
from European history for her biographies, from
scientific debates for her fiction. She could
create this immortal monster, but also chart
a path for social reform based on cooperation,
not just individual rebellion. That warning in
Frankenstein about overreaching ambition, about
creation without responsibility. I mean, has
there ever been a more relevant message for our
world today? Probably not. And yet this incredibly
prolific, brilliant professional spent the last
two decades of her life carefully, meticulously
crafting a safer, more palatable public image
for her radical husband just to make sure his
legacy survived. Which brings us to a final,
really provocative thought. Go on. We know Mary
Shelley was a lifelong liberal and feminist.
We know she risked her own safety to help ostracized
women, creating false identities for them. We
also know she spent years carefully hiding the
most radical parts of her husband's work from
the public. So if she was forced to censor him
to ensure his survival, What hidden depths of
revolutionary thought did she consciously keep
out of her own public work? What truly dangerous
ideas about society, power, and revolution did
the ultimate literary survivor choose not to
share with the world? What would the book by
the completely uncensored Mary Shelley have looked
like? That is the hidden legacy of the ultimate
romantic outlaw that we're still maybe waiting
to fully discover.