The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time … The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire.  

—Edward Trelawney’s account of Percy Shelley’s funeral pyre, 1822

Imagine Mrs. Shelley, refusing to attend her husband’s immolation only to return to sift through the remains; avoiding the scene as it happened, the pagan funeral on the beach, but returning to the stinking pyre to steal away with the poet’s pagan heart. 

In fact, I can imagine it no other way: Mary, in 1822, the color of salt, a stranger on the foreign shores of Italy awash in familiar grief, elbows deep in gristly leavings. Isn’t that who and what she was—a scavenger of spare parts? As a writer, so a wife?  

In fact, I need not imagine it—Percy’s heart, I mean. Here it is at the New York Public Library behind exhibition glass. Mary, so I’ve learned, obtained Percy’s heart after his death and kept it in a drawer in her writing desk. This tiny shred of tissue outlived them both, is still among the New York Public Library’s so-called “Gallery of Treasures” two centuries after Percy’s death, along with an early galley of Frankenstein covered in Mr. Shelley’s slanted notes. 

Not so unusual a keepsake if you know Mary the writer as I like to think I do. The creator of Frankenstein only found reality useful when fragmentary. She wanted just enough of the world as it was to serve as scaffolding for her imagination, but not so much that fact would overwhelm her dreaming. In her writing, in her marriage, she imposed a strict distance between the symbol and the object to which it referred so her metaphors would have room to breathe. She knew that metaphors, once brought to life, shift, multiply, take on unpredictable shapes. The heart, for instance, is a mere ten paces from another exhibit across the hall, the Awe of the Arctic, where, among other nautical arcana, you can find a log of Captain John Ross’ journey circa 1818, the same year Frankenstein was published, when he set out from England in search of a passage through the North Pole. 

Mary followed Arctic expeditions such as Ross’ closely, and the Arctic seeped into what she wrote. The influence of Ross’ journey can be found in Frankenstein’s opening and closing pages, an arctic frame which contains the book. Like Ross, Mary’s Captain Robert Walton also attempts to sail into that “Region of Beauty and Delight,” as Mary termed it, and like Ross, he never quite arrives. In Mary’s time, the great white expanse was still “uncharted,” on the verge of discovery. In my time, the white is breaking down, revealing that filthy workshop of human color: brown, and green, and red—the color of Percy’s funeral pyre and of his heart. 

As it melts, all manner of strange pairings surface. What was lost is briefly found; shipwrecks breach. What was depth becomes surface; history bobs before it liquifies. A portal to the North is possible once again. I think I see, among the floating objects, something—a mirage? a marriage?—begin to twitch.  

What called Mary to the Arctic? 

You may well ask what called her to become a wife. 

Marriage and the arctic, both, were abstractions in Mary’s early childhood; overheard, but never seen up close. Imagine Mary, at eight years old, concealed behind a chairback in her father’s parlor. Coleridge, a friend of her father, Godwin, is unaware that chairs, as well as walls, have ears. He recites the Rime: 

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Mary, a good girl, does not hang the albatross about her neck (she covers it in tissue paper and hides it in her desk). 

At sixteen, she crouches again—this time behind her mother’s headstone. She asks Dead Mary what it is to be a wife. Her mother replies with cracks and growls, roars and howls. Sound advice. But Living Mary doesn’t hear the answer to her question, too consumed with that pesky wanting that drives sailors to eat their own hands, their ship stove in by ice; the kind that mutes all sound and color but a high and keening whine: Percy Shelley had arrived. 

He was an alchemist-poet, exiled from Oxford for ‘antithetical beliefs;’ he dabbled, as you may well know, in all manner of the unseen arts. He visited both Mary and her mother, Mary, in the church yard/charnel house to which Mary the daughter often retired to read. His talk, at first, made the possibility of touch nearly obsolete; he twanged the nerves of young Mary Godwin from the gentlemanly distance of a yard. His words outstripped the wind. To listen was to shiver like an animal, freshly skinned. 

The bones of Mary Wollstonecraft served as precedent and introduction. Mary, the daughter, spoke of love and freedom, freedom and love, with a textual authority that her experience did not reflect. She spoke to the married poet frankly, without the merest hint of blush (Percy would remember the paleness of her cheek, almost marbleized, like a statue sprung to life). To talk in such a manner was to escape the strictures of her body. What was a Marriage of Equals, Mary mused, but a conversation of souls? What were she and Percy in the graveyard but two friendly, disembodied ghosts? 

When he touched her, Mary’s flesh betrayed her youth (her hair raised of its own accord, as if visited by a winter’s frost). 

This was 1814. The weather of new love didn’t remain cool for long. It grew hot, as a matter of fact, roiling and wet when Mary ran away from home with Percy to the south of France. She grew enfevered on the journey, and Percy, for the first time, played his doubled-part: both Mary’s corrupter and her nurse. They sailed across the channel, Mary’s eyes closed, her head on his lap while he read to her from Byron whom he’d not yet met—one shade the more, one ray the less—and both learned that passion, when read aloud, alchemized the written word into flesh. I am speaking, of course, of the Six Weeks’ Tour, when Mary’s girlhood lugged her womanhood across the countryside until the latter ate its way out. 

France was filthy, Catholic, only recently besieged. The peasants had lost children and lost limbs, and blinked at visitors glassily, themselves blasted monuments pinned behind sheets. Roads petered off into over-growth, innkeepers shuttered blinds. Toothless women laughed. So, the lovers, in the dusky evening of the Napoleonic Wars felt their way to Switzerland nearly blind. When they crossed the border, Mary met, with great relief, her first region of white. 

The Swiss cottages are much cleaner and neater, and the inhabitants exhibit the same contrast. The Swiss women wear a great deal of white linen, and their whole dress is always perfectly clean. 

Swiss cows, untouched by war, were not enforced to roving; they suckled steady soil, producing steady milk. 

Mary was in bliss. Maybe she thought she found, amid Swiss linen, a synecdoche for marriage—or at least the marital bed. I suspect this misapprehension was the child in Mary harboring a childish belief: that she could perform the filthy act and remain, like Swiss linen, white and neat, or that Swiss neutrality could be affected by a woman’s body (no matter how she was besieged). Love, in any case, seemed to act strangely when it came into contact with the alpine ice. She wrote in her diary:

The summits of several of the mountains that enclose the lake to the south are covered by eternal glaciers; of one of these, opposite Brunen, they tell the story of a priest and his mistress, who, flying from persecution, inhabited a cottage at the foot of the snows. One winter night an avalanche overwhelmed them, but their plaintive voices are still heard in stormy nights. 

Mary’s fantasy, taking on the character of her surroundings, was of a marriage outside of marriage (like a land outside of time). She fantasized that a conversation between bodies might mirror a conversation between souls. She imagined love like two figures in motion that, seen from a distance, merged into a single, unmoving form.

As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

But Mary was not idle nor was she wed. She and Percy hardly stopped to rest. By the fifth week of the Six Weeks’ Tour, she was showing. Mary, who had no mother to explain these things, did not yet know to ask the question that would become the question of her life: at what point does a hypothetical solidify, beget the present tense? Put another way: when does the act bring the noun to life? (Seven hundred miles away, in sturdy London, Dead Mary rattled a locked drawer, unquiet in a quiet house.)

In the meantime, Mary the daughter had more pressing concerns. Percy was hemorrhaging cash. Hungry, broke, Percy and Mary sought shelter within sight of the alps.

We dined at Servoz, wrote Percy, in a letter home: A little village, where there are lead and copper mines, and where we saw a cabinet of natural curiosities, like those of Keswick and Bethgelert.

The lovers took refuge from the world that dogged them with its unyielding and unsexy debtors’ receipts to tour this Cabinet of Curiosity, to observe the world as imitation, pickled, plucked, shrunken, and duty free: the two-headed chicken, the abalone shell, the rib of the giant, the malformed skull of the ape. And when they sensed the room which held the cabinet had gone twilit, much too gloomy for the hour, the couple, as one, looked up. Percy later wrote:

—Mont Blanc was before us— but covered with cloud; its base, furrowed with dreadful gaps, was seen above. Pinnacles of snow intolerably bright, shone through the clouds at intervals on high. I never knew—I never imagined what mountains were before … a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness.

Mary’s instinct was to hold the distance, cure Mont Blanc inside the cabinet, steal the white mountain away from time. But love makes one intrepid, curious, drunk. So, the Shelley’s (who were not the Shelley’s yet) drew yet nearer, to walk dreamily, as if dreaming, across the Sea of Ice. 

Percy wrote as if the mountain, seen in life, exploded the word on the page, as if it squirmed before him, foreboding, implacable, disquietingly alive— unsteady and terribly prepared to rove.

In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same. The echo of rocks, or of the ice and snow which fall from their overhanging precipices, or roll from their aerial summits, scarcely ceases for one moment. One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins.

Mary and Percy’s last act as tourists was to buy souvenirs: imitations of their expedition with which to fill their imitation home. 

For Percy: seeds of rare alpine plants for his hallucinatory garden, intentions that would molder in a coat pocket, a promise he had no place to keep. 

For Mary: a crystal seal, Mont Blanc in miniature and upside down, with which one might cover the mouth of a letter, conceal the innards of a private correspondence; a wax picture one must break open in order to release the word inside.

(And one last souvenir, never purchased, and yet returned: a child, a daughter who entered into the world too early, and went, without pausing, from a possibility in perfect motion to an object, gravely still.) Mary wrote:

It was perfectly well
when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give
it suck it appeared to be sleeping
so quietly that I would not awake it—

And when it would not wake, Mary snuck a cutting of the baby’s hair and hid it in her desk.

🩸

The next time Mary paid Switzerland a visit, she kept her distance from the Mountain, but the alps found her just the same. It was the Year Without a Summer, 1816. This part of the story you’ve surely heard before, but let’s review (just in case): Byron, in a rented villa on Lake Geneva, hosts his new friends Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, his doctor, John Polodari, and his lover of the hour, Claire Clairmont, who is, as it happens, Mary’s (step)sister.

On the other side of the world, in Indonesia, the world has ended, but the vacationers at the villa haven’t heard. A volcanic eruption has blocked out the sun; in Western Europe, the darkness is divorced of its source and becomes a supernatural phenomenon: Lake Geneva floods, rabbits drown, foxes bloat, crops die, the peasant class knows hunger like they haven’t known since the war, and the bohemians sleep poorly, dream wakefully, tell stories in the dark. 

Byron, bored, proposes a ghost story contest to which we now owe the most famous monsters of the modern world. All guests participate but one. Percy, once the contest has begun in earnest, flies from the room. He has been visited by a vision too terrible to behold: Mary’s body transformed, her breasts opened and fixed on him as if in a withering look. In fact, they were no longer breasts, in Percy’s vision, but two staring, yellow eyes.

His reaction is so violent, that Mary’s second child, William, who will not live to see his fifth year, begins to cry. Despite the pandemonium, or because of it, Mary writes. 

Her contribution to Byron’s contest begins with a waking dream. 

You may well recognize its particulars, if not its frame. There is a pale faced student who dabbles in the unseen arts, there is the creature that student brings to life and from which he tries to flee, paradoxically, by laying down to sleep. The creature peers through the student’s bed curtains with a yellow gleaming eye terribly fixed on the sleeper in the dark November night. 

Afterward, Mary, horrified by what the dream seemed to portend, tried to banish it from sight.

I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.

The alpine landscape, for all its solid reality, could not overcome the suggestive power of the dream; Instead, Mont Blanc acted as the phantom’s frame. Both persisted, both remained.

I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted.

🩸

Indeed, Mary took Mont Blanc from Switzerland and hid it in the novel’s very heart; it’s where the monster, who in the first half of Frankenstein appears in flickers and mirages as an inarticulate phantom, comes to confront his maker; it is where we first hear the creature speak: 

Listen to my tale; when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak … listen to me, and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

The region of white was absorbent enough to contain not only the monster’s visage, but his speech, a blank page to be inked, and yet Mont Blanc, itself, did not satisfy Mary’s insatiable hunger for white. It was only a cutting of that greater region from which Coleridge drew his verses, that hovered for Mary somewhere out of reach: the Arctic. Between the first draft of Frankenstein and its final galleys, Mary studied, like a woman possessed, the North Pole, the mass of land around which the restlessness of her entire age seemed to collect. She pored over the accounts of Northern Sojourners like Barrow, Scoresby, and Ross. For like the Englishmen that sought the Hyperborean paradise, Mary also dreamt of a thaw in the heart of the ice. When her third child succumbed to dysentery in 1817, she wrote:

Dream that my little baby came to life again · that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. 

Awake and find no baby.

Still, it haunted.

🩸

The Arctic frame was a late edition to Frankenstein. From 1816, when Mary began the novel, to its publication, two years later, the novel grew exponentially. Some additions we owe to Percy, who was Mary’s editor as well as her lover, but the Arctic setting glimpsed through Robert Walton’s letters came from Mary alone. It is, as if, to get to Frankenstein and his monster, Mary wanted the reader to break open a waxen seal in which the story was enclosed. 

Robert’s letters home to sister Margaret contain a record of Victor Frankenstein’s shipboard dictation, of Victor’s voice translated to the page. So, though the monster’s story is recited to Victor on the slopes of Mont Blanc, Mary’s frame makes this Mont Blanc itself the object of a recitation, conjured in an idle ship upon the Arctic Ocean. One scene of recitation placed within the other, a Swiss mountain on the Polar Sea—two spectacles of white, two portals to the divine—one overlaying the other in a superimposition, producing an altogether new image: a mountain suddenly materialized on an empty field of shifting ice.

We know that planets are called wanderers, and why not mountains, too?

Imagine it. No, do.

When Mary was writing Frankenstein, Captain Ross’ dream of discovering a direct passage over the pole, was approaching reality. Ross, in 1818, believed he was on the verge of breaking through, of staking a claim on the unclaimable white. He arrived at Baffin Bay in the summer of 1818—and then, inexplicably, turned around and sailed back home. He recorded in the log what he described as a mountain range blocking his path. That mountain range could not be found by those who made the journey after Ross. In fact, no one has seen it since. It’s what is called a fata morgana, a mirage, a magic mountain, the very same as that one which Mary Shelley, back in Europe, seems to have conjured with her pen—a dream so suggestive, so seductive that poor Captain Ross recorded it as fact. He was perhaps the first to do so. Not the last. 

Consider Mary’s portrait, the Rothwell, for which she sat in 1840, a year before she was diagnosed with the brain tumor that would take her life, twenty-two years after the publication of Frankenstein. This is the Mary—long-necked, hollow-eyed, wanly androgynous, luridly white—that is summoned when one brings the youthful prodigy to mind: it is Mary the girl peering through Mary the ghost. (Or we might say Mary, at eighteen, as remembered by her future corpse.) 

The portrait reveals what the eye obscures. 

She was Mary the object born of her mother’s death, and she was her mother, Mary, reborn in the flesh. She was also the doctor handling the nameless cadaver, then turning, unwashed, to Mary Wollstonecraft’s womb (for Mary Shelley had such a doctor in her waiting to be born). Mary was the medium, the midwife, the one who straddled worlds, the eye peering through the chink in the wall, the opener of passages between the living and the dead.

She did not always keep her hands clean—and what she touched she kept.

For if collecting was Mary’s compulsion, collage was her art. She took cuttings of reality, she assembled the spare parts. Some of her creations lay there on the page as imitations and nothing more—perfectly hideous, perfectly still. Others—how else to put it?—twitched. 

Her husband, for instance. 

Mary buried her son, William, in 1818 (a fulsome year), and when she did, Percy interpreted her grief as abandonment. He felt her withdraw from him altogether, he, whose likeness all her children, now gone, shared. She appeared to him unknowable, utterly remote. He wrote to her: 

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine. 

But this verse, while pretty, doesn’t quite strike me as true. 

It’s true that Percy spent his marriage chasing a lovely form of a woman he could never quite reach, but was it Mary, or did he have the order of the chase confused? The form of the thing he sought, the woman, the muse, remained steady in his purview, and yet never drew nearer no matter the pace of his pursuit. Who, in his real marriage, was chasing whom?

Consider: Mary, unknowing, was with child that morning in 1814 when she and Percy first stepped clumsily, not yet married, across the base of Mont Blanc. Mary, even then, in neutral Switzerland, withheld from the man who wasn’t yet her husband a secret that wasn’t yet a conscious thought. She kept the child growing in a place inside her person he couldn’t fathom much less touch. The longer he held her, the more she grew to hold. The more he watched, the more she changed. Mary with child, Mary weening a child, Mary burying a child in the earth, Mary dreaming, Mary writing, Mary taking on his name and forcing it to grow. Another novel, another baby underway, and she an open wound. Paranoia dogged him when he now beheld his bride: what else might she become? 

Percy ran to Mary until he saw that the horror he glimpsed on the Swiss mountain was the same as that which she kept within: not a region of beauty and delight, no, but a terrible, teeming, wild white. Mont Blanc, to Percy, was a horror from which he fled (he had been running ever since).

What was it he saw when he went stepping across the glacier? Not a color, but color liquified; not flatland, but land without shadow. Out there, on the ice, distances buckled. Shallows plunged. Continents could shrink to fit in the palm of the hand, spectral kingdoms could be teased or plucked. It was not the white of canvas, on which one’s dreams could be arranged in verse and pinned. It was the white of transformation, transmutation, and was, itself, just these. It was perpetual becoming, unbecoming. Land into water, water into land. It was a vast animal: unearthly, and yet too much of the earth.

 In other words, it was a mother. (Or a monster, if you prefer.) 

He ran from Mary whilst grasping her firmly by the wrist, forcing her to run no matter how her body, or his children cried out for rest. In a state of perpetual motion, he plunged, in fact, from one Region of Beauty to the next, in each new dream pursuing what the first withheld. 

For if Percy slowed, even for an instant, he might have to face squarely what constant motion enabled him to elude. Dreaming may have seemed the opposite of action, it happened to you—dreams are often had in bed, after all, lying on one’s back. But just like that other thing done in bed, dreaming was an act: an act of creation, no less, and being so, it left a remainder. If he turned to look behind him, he might see a string of dreams created and abandoned, twitching in his wake. And he might see Mary, truly, not a dream, but lying in his dream house, white with pain.

🩸

The year is 1822. Mary and Percy flee to Italy where they make another temporary home, this time in a 16^th century monastery—the kind of curiosity that you might tour, but in which Percy, in his wild way, means to live. 

It is, among other things, lividly white. 

It is, among other things, a place to say goodbye.

Villa Magni, built into the water, seems in the act of breaking onto the surf. It stands where land meets sea, and appears, on the leeward approach, to float—almost a ship, almost a home. The site of the monastery was originally chosen for its solitude, for its proximity to the edge, by virgin men, ascetic by choice, a place for their vows to be taken, their silences kept. It is also, practically speaking, utterly remote. If a doctor had to pay a house-call, he would need to know how to row. 

Villa Magni is another region of white, but Mary, older now, no longer covets the hue. White, like red and brown, is just another of the body’s secretions. It flies from the tongue, bubbles from the wound, aches in the breast as milk, unexpressed. Neither steady nor sturdy, Italy has already claimed three of her children; she comes to the Villa pregnant and convinced that childbirth will either be the death of her or that she will bury a fourth. She either is or contains a living corpse.

Bed-bound, Mary often remains shoreside while her husband takes to the sea (Percy, everyone agrees, has never looked so well). She listens to the wind roar and howl, crack and growl and thinks of her mother—specifically, the eleven days that lapsed between Mary the daughter’s, birth, and Mary the mother’s, grave. She thinks of the time of gestation, when the baby cried, hungry, and the fever set in. She wonders if her mother, while she waited to die, asked the question that would become the question of her death: how, in a Marriage of Equals, does one account for the fundamental inequality of sex?

It is in such a mood that Mary writes to sturdy London and sends for her desk.  

At night, Mary barely sleeps. The rooms are close, and sea-battered (Mary later likened the waves, at night, to heavy artillery). What sleep she gets is fitful while Percy’s is deep. Villa Magni—an envy of the isles, a pleasure-house —is Percy’s dream-house: for him, it is the fancy and is for fantasizing. There are no locks on the doors. Within, Percy’s nighttime visions step out of bed, grow legs and often roam. 

Most nights, Percy’s dream is recurring, and so simple, a child could have written it. He sees himself and a faceless woman—his fata morgana, the living figure of his muse—nestled in the skip of the boat which mad, bad Byron named the Don Juan—somewhere just off the Lerici Coast. A phantom girl, who cannot change nor grow, who shimmers as she sits and is the poetry he reads her. On his back, in the boat, all he can see is a flat, blue, mass—a placeless place where there is no future and no past, not even wind. There is the sea, the girl, and the poet, adrift.

As idle as a painted ship
upon a painted ocean. 

But on this night, a sudden shift. Thunder crack and lightning flash: the picture, horribly, begins to move. A storm beyond the periphery of the dream rolls in off of the coast. Shutters balk, floorboards groan.

Mary opens her eyes. It is July 1822. She finds that she is bleeding, the child in her hemorrhaging, the body insisting, in spite of what it costs, that it is time. 

Percy, drunk on laudanum and poesy, doesn’t wake. He dreams on, but the dream, responsive to the weather, undergoes a change. In Percy’s dream, he’s in Villa Magni watching Mary sleep while a monster draws up beside her. Its hands wrap, like coiling snakes, around her throat. Percy must bear witness. He is caught, inchoate and impotent in the pre-recorded action of the dream; it is not his role, not here, to intervene. As his wife convulses, stills, goes limp, and begins to marbleize, the monster turns round, and O! Horror! Percy sees his own face there, superimposed on fiendish features, stretched out into a murderous grin—my own vampire, as the Doctor says when he sees his monster prowling on Mont Blanc, my own spirit let loose from the grave. And as the creature that is Percy closes in on himself, he hears a voice cry out from a celluloid future he unknowingly invents:

It’s alive! It’s alive!

It would take nothing less, I tell you, to scare poor Percy awake; and when he wakes, he runs—to his real wife, who lies in his real house, dying but awake. He finds Mary in a bed gone red and brown and white. He lifts her with a strength the poet does not typically evince, and lays her, carefully, lovingly, into a bath of ice. 

The ice staunches the bleeding, slows the heart, saves her life. 

Within a month, he and his ship will be swept into the sea. 

When Percy’s remains are laid out on the pyre, Mary will vow not to look. She will tell herself the body is a vessel, and the soul from it dispersed. But a doubt will grip her in the form of the monster, who, in Frankenstein’s last pages, speaks in Percy’s voice. Before the creature makes for the Arctic ice to set himself aflame, he makes a final promise. In Mary’s initial draft he vows: 

I shall ascend my pile triumphantly & the flame that consumes my body will give rest & blessings to my mind.

But in Percy’s revision, in the Frankenstein we know, the line has undergone a change:

I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

The image is the same, but Percy’s revision inserts an ambiguity, a restlessness that wasn’t present before. The possibility of a thinking spirit, a remainder, preserved in the ice.

In 200 years, the heart Mary stole will bear no likeness to the poet’s body, as flimsy and as brittle as a piece of parchment, faintly inscribed. In fact, it looks to me very like the pages of a first edition Frankenstein. Mary, as you may well know, was never satisfied with the work. She couldn’t leave well enough alone. She revised and reissued it in 1831, nine years after Percy’s death. In the introduction, Mary cites stylistic incongruities, bald phrases, the inexperience of youth. But there is one further reason, to which she alludes:

Its pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more … And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth.

Percy’s heart doesn’t twitch behind exhibition glass; his spirit isn’t enclosed in flesh any more than it once rattled a drawer in Mary’s desk. Still, something of the writer and her companion live on—not immortalized, but continuously reread, revisited, reborn. A restless object. A thinking spirit. In other words, a book.