Before she turned twenty, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley birthed Frankenstein and changed horror forever. A literary prodigy raised among radicals and revolutionaries, she didn’t just invent science fiction, but lived a life that was like something out of a gothic novel. Think graveyard rendezvous, dead poets, apocalyptic visions, and one very stubborn heart that refused to burn.
Now, as Guillermo del Toro prepares to unleash his long-awaited Frankenstein adaptation later this year — starring Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi — it’s the perfect time to revisit the strange, tragic, and totally goth life of the woman who started it all. Here are five freaky facts about Mary Shelley that prove she was always the real monster maker.
Who was Mary Shelley?
Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley was born in 1797 to two radical thinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft, the firebrand author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, a political philosopher and one of the earliest proponents of anarchism. Her mother died shortly after childbirth, leaving Mary to grow up under the shadow of a feminist legend and the rigorous teachings of her father.
Raised among poets, scientists, and revolutionaries, Mary’s early life was steeped in big ideas and bigger emotions. At sixteen, however, she scandalized society by running away with the already-married Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a doomed love affair that would define her life and fuel her writing. Two years later, while holed up in a Swiss villa with Percy, Lord Byron, and other literary misfits, Mary stitched together Frankenstein, a novel that would electrify the world and give birth to modern science fiction.
But Mary’s brilliance came wrapped in tragedy. She lost children, buried friends, and watched her beloved Percy drown before her thirtieth birthday. Still, she kept writing. She wrote ghost stories, political novels, futuristic dystopias, and edited her late husband’s work after his death.
Mary Shelley lived like a character from her own work: brilliant, haunted, and ahead of her time.
1. First Night with Percy Bysshe Shelley on Her Mother’s Grave
It’s one of the most whispered-about rumors in literary history. and it’s one that just might be true. When Mary Shelley was only sixteen, she and the then-married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley began their scandalous affair. According to several biographers, they may have consummated their relationship in one of the most goth locations imaginable: on (or very near) her mother’s grave.
Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was buried in London’s St. Pancras Churchyard and it became a place of pilgrimage for the daughter she never got to know. Mary reportedly learned to read by tracing the letters on her mother’s headstone. She often went there to think, write, and — apparently — fall in love.
According to Romantic Outlaws author Charlotte Gordon, scholars “traditionally accept” that something major happened between Mary and Percy at the grave. A letter from Percy refers to the day as his “birthday,” and it’s where Mary allegedly first declared her love for him. Whether they actually had sex there may be lost to time, but the symbolism of uniting love, death, and legacy in a single moment feels right out of a gothic romance and right on brand for Mary Shelley.
If it sounds morbid, well…it was 1814, emotions were intense, and this was a girl raised on feminism, graveyards, and Romantic poetry. You can’t get much more goth than that.
2. She Was Part of A Love Triangle Drenched in Tragedy
Before Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin became Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley was already a husband and his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, would become a ghost lingering behind every scandalous step he took with Mary.
Harriet was smart, well-educated, and only sixteen when she eloped with the nineteen-year-old poet. At first, she threw herself into his literary and political ideals, but their marriage was troubled from the start. Percy’s growing disdain for bourgeois domesticity — and Harriet’s close relationship with her sister Eliza — created a rift. Still, they tried.
But in 1814, Percy met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. It wasn’t long before the two ran off together and Harriet was left behind in the tightening vice of social shame.
In late 1816, at only twenty-one years old, Harriet left her lodgings in Knightsbridge and drowned herself in the Serpentine River. The inquest ruled it a suicide and her final note leaves little doubt. The spelling and grammar may be broken, but the despair cuts clean and deep:
“When you read this letr. I shall be no more an inhabitant of this miserable world. do not regret the loss of one who could never be anything but a source of vexation & misery to you all belonging to me… My dear Bysshe … if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of… so shall my spirit find rest & forgiveness. God bless you all is the last prayer of the unfortunate Harriet S—“
Within weeks of Harriet’s death, Mary and Percy married — more for legal necessity than romance, but the shadow of Harriet’s ghost never quite left their story. It’s a reminder that Mary Shelley’s life was shaped by love, yes, but also by guilt, grief, and the very real horror of a woman erased.
3. She Birthed a Monster
It was the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer when volcanic ash from halfway around the world darkened the skies over Europe, crops failed, and storms rolled endlessly across Lake Geneva. Into this gloom stepped a group of brilliant young writers with too much money, too many drugs, and a thirst for the macabre.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just eighteen, arrived with Percy Bysshe Shelley to stay with Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati. Also in attendance: Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister and Byron’s mistress and Byron’s physician and occasional frenemy John Polidori who would later pen The Vampyre, the literary ancestor of Dracula. Trapped indoors by cold rain and electrical storms, the group turned to a game: who could write the best ghost story?
Fueled by laudanum and real-life ponderings, Mary didn’t just create a ghost story, but dreamed of a pale student kneeling beside a corpse, giving it life through unnatural means. When she woke, Frankenstein had begun to take shape — the tale of a man who defies death and pays the price.
What started as a fireside game became a literary revolution. In the span of one haunted summer, Mary Shelley invented science-fiction and gave the world its most enduring monster.
4. She Wrote a Post-Apocalyptic Plague Novel Before It Was Cool
Before dystopia became a genre, Mary Shelley imagined the end of the world and she did it in heartbreakingly personal fashion. In 1826 she published The Last Man, a bleak sci-fi novel set in the 21st century, where a mysterious plague wipes out humanity.
It was one of the first post-apocalyptic novels ever written. Critics at the time hated it — too grim, too political, too weird. But now? It feels eerily modern. Mass death, global collapse, one lonely survivor.
What makes it even more haunting is how personal it was. Mary filled the book with characters inspired by her lost loved ones, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Their fictional counterparts fall to the plague one by one, just as they fell before her one by one in real life.
The novel was mostly ignored in her lifetime and ultimately rediscovered in the 1960s. But today it reads almost as a prophecy.
5. She Kept Percy’s Heart…Literally
When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a storm off the coast of Italy in 1822, he was just twenty-nine. His body washed up ten days later, bloated and unrecognizable, only identifiable by his clothes and the volume of fellow Romantic poet John Keats’s Lamia still tucked in his pocket.
But the real story begins at the funeral pyre.
As was custom at the time, Percy’s body was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. But something strange happened: his heart refused to burn. Some doctors now believe it may have been calcified from an earlier bout of tuberculosis. Others say that’s beside the point because the gothic image was already complete.
Percy’s friend Leigh Hunt was there and claimed the heart for himself, but eventually returned it to Mary. She, however, didn’t bury it. She wrapped it in silk and stored it inside her writing desk, nestled between pages of Adonais, Percy’s elegy for John Keats.
When Mary died in 1851, Percy’s heart was discovered still hidden among her belongings. It was later buried in the family vault beside their son, Percy Florence Shelley, but by then the legend had already taken root: the great Romantic poet whose heart refused to die and the woman who kept it close until the very end.
Romantic? Morbid? Definitely both.
Why She Still Matters — and Why del Toro Gets It
Mary Shelley wasn’t just the mother of science fiction — she was the original horror queen. A literary rebel who turned grief into art, scandal into legend, and monsters into metaphors, she wrote stories that still feel painfully relevant centuries later. Her life was filled with tragedy, but her work never lost its fire. Instead, it blended horror, heartbreak, and intellect in a way that was revolutionary then and timeless now.
It’s no wonder Guillermo del Toro has long been drawn to her legacy. His best films — Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth — blur the line between beauty and monstrosity, pain and wonder, just like Mary’s work did. He doesn’t just make monster movies — he makes romantic monster movies. Tragic. Lush. Painfully human.
His upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi, promises a fresh take that honors Mary Shelley’s original vision: not just a cautionary tale about science gone wrong, but a meditation on loss, loneliness, and the desperate need to be loved.
Mary Shelley gave us the monster. Del Toro is giving him back — heart, horror, and all.
So before Frankenstein rises again, remember the brilliant, haunted woman who started it all.