A new book to be released.
Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics
The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley
By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Michael January
Cover of Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley
The inspiration for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s most famous work, “Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus” first published anonymously in 1818 has been debated for 200 years. In a later edition of the book Mary Shelley included an introduction to answer interest in the origin of the story, speaking of a challenge between friends, including herself, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron to write a horror story, in what has come to be called the “gothic summer” of 1816 at the Villa Diodoti on Lake Geneva. In this introduction, she claimed the idea had come to her in a waking dream, but never revealed where the name of the book or her character came from and the origin of the most famous name in literature has been a mystery ever since. The inspiration for one of the most successful and famous fantasy novels in history lies much earlier in the experiences of a teenage girl in love and searching for a connection to the mother she had never known.
It is very popular for teenagers of modern times between the last years of highschool and college to go off to foreign lands and tour Europe with backpacks, to find themselves and expand horizons. Today this is done with a rail pass and plane tickets and ATMs for money from home. It didn’t quite work that way in the Regency and Empire years of the early 19th Century, the days of Jane Austen. The “Grand Tour” had just come into vogue.
In 1814, 16 year old Mary Godwin eloped with the 22 year old married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, taking her 15 year old step-sister Claire Clairmont with them as “chaperone”, and the three of them went on a tour or Europe, from Paris across the Jura mountains to the shores of Lake Lucerne, walking across France and Switzerland with a “portmanteau” on a donkey rather than back-packs, encountering the brutal ravages of the Napoleonic Wars and discovering adventures in beautiful wild countryside, challenging customs of the time and awakening sexual awareness. The journey would take them from ruined villages of Champagne, to the alps of Switzerland, and up the Rhine River to a castle called Frankenstein. After having married Shelley, after his wife’s suicide, Mary would publish the diaries she kept of that journey.
In the 1817 published version of “A History of a Six Weeks Tour”, she would tell where they went and what they saw, but she kept the true intimate details of that trip, of two teenage sisters on a tour of Europe with the Romantic poet of “free love” from where a later inspiration for a famous horror tale arose, to herself, striking out any portions that might be too scandalous to reveal. At the end of her life, when a promise was no longer needed to be kept, Mary Shelley decided to reveal the intimate secrets of that trip. Those revelations, discovered in a lost memoir manuscript found in a private collection in Switzerland were never published, until now, in the “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley”. Due out in the summer of 2015.
The e-book is available for pre-order at Amazon Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics. More information can be found at Frankensteindiaries.com and at Prestbury Books.
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