Mary Shelley’s Secret Memoirs Fact or Fiction?
I was asked this by a reviewer, and it might be useful to clarify for those who read it, want to read it, or listen to the Audiobook and wonder, how much of this is true?
There is a well-known line from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” that goes “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. What is regularly printed about the origin of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is her story of a sudden vision in a waking dream. But is this factual? Or all of the facts? Does an author just wake up one morning with an image in mind and create a work of deep and rich complex themes in a fever of five months writing while reading science texts, or is their creativity informed by a collection of life experiences that inspire an exploration of who they are? It is often said to young writers, “write what you know”, and first works that resonate and catch on are most usually from some very personal place. In Frankenstein, Mary wrote a fictional character, but was it to put a distance between her personal self and her subject, while really writing about her own demons?
Some have said the creature represents Shelley. I disagree. I think it’s the other way around. But who is the “monster” born from a powerful force of nature, then abandoned by the object of that force which brought it to life, inspired to wreak havoc and destruction on the lives of those around him?
Like the birth of the creature though a “powerful force”, the creation of a literary work may be sparked by a thought or image, but it must be connected to something already teeming in the mind of the author. This is what I have attempted to explore or offer an explanation. And to answer one of the most intriguing questions in literature, though not often asked, why did Mary Shelley never publicly say where the odd name for the book came from? In spite of constant questions that caused her to write two separate explanations of how she came up with the idea for the book.
One “biographer” tried to make the case that she didn’t write it at all, but just copied text that Shelley wrote. But Shelley was much too busy dodging creditors, looking for a place to live, supervising the publishing of Byron’s Childe Harold, and writing some of his own work. So the explanation must be something she didn’t want to reveal. Mary was keenly aware that her mother’s reputation was ruined by revelations of her intimate life revealed by her father in his biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, so she would be very reticent in revealing intimate details of her own life.
I consider the book technically appropriate in the fiction section rather than non-fiction as a broad genre, but it could also be in the biography section as some biographies are narrative. But it is quite a genre of its own I believe, a speculative autobiography, where I have taken the written words of the author and expanded on them. Listening now to the audiobook, as some time has passed, it is even hard for me to be sure what is Mary and what is me, something I’m pleased about. I wanted it to be seamless.
Almost all biographies of William Shakespeare are essentially speculative fiction, with whole cloth created from a very few known documented facts, but they end up in the biography section in very thick volumes as “fact”. But I am not a doctoral candidate and rather than a paper with annotated references, I wanted to tell a story that would illuminate characters and lives lived rather than dry facts. So it is narrative or perhaps more accurately, dramatization.
About a quarter to a third of the book is previously published text of Mary Shelley, so technically she is a co-author, and can take first position because it is also her own story and marquee name. Does Bill O’Reilly really write his books? The rest is based on factual historical events, dates, and references in writings both published and unpublished by Mary and the other participants, chiefly Shelley, Claire and Godwin, with some quoted material of Mary Wollstonecraft, some material not publicly available that offers clues, and by deducing motivations from known interests of the participants. Some my own construction.
Aside from textual research, the book is very much informed by my following in the physical footsteps of the Shelleys in the journey they took in 1814, taking a reference to events at a location in Mary’s diary, standing on the actual spot, seeing what she saw, and reconstructing how an event may have taken shape.
As an example: in Brunnen, Switzerland, the house where Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont stayed, the old “Chateau”, is gone now. But its location can be deduced by the layout of the village, and determining that to get from there to the town market square in 1814 you would have to take a certain street and would have a certain view out the window. Mary reported in her journal that before leaving, they sent for a doctor (a Medicin) who brought with him a priest. Why? She had reported in her journal of her stomach upset, usually associated with sea voyages, but not this time. Does she say in her printed journal that they suspected she was pregnant? No. But if you correlate the timing of when her first child was born, it is the most likely explanation.
Another example: in her published journal Mary reports of the very strange behavior of their driver in France, garrulous and abandoning them suddenly, but she doesn’t attempt any explanation. While in Claire’s diaries, she writes of an incident with the driver when Shelley stripped naked and went into a stream and invited Mary to join him, upsetting the driver.
And in most reporting of these people, the step-sister is nearly always called Claire Clairmont. But that was not her real name. She invented it for herself, and in fact was so confusing to Mary that she would refer to her step-sister by different names and spellings in the same letter. I attempt to make some sense of this.
About half the book is my reading between the lines and connecting dots, speculating on what may have happened in some places where Mary left out details of time. There are maybe two or three chapters that are mostly whole cloth woven from a few threads of references, or trying to rationally explain the negative. To explain why she would deliberately leave something out, and the meaning of the book she wrote or attempted to write before Frankenstein, but never dared let see the light of day.
I especially wanted to reveal the world where she lived, to explore the connections in this world where people knew each other and speculate on what that familiarity may have caused on one another in their daily lives. I also wanted it to be entertaining. This is my version of these characters; others might have different takes on them and argue facts differently, while others still may arrange known records to fit their own themes.
Michael January “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley”
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