“When Shelley’s corpse washed ashore, a friend identified it by a copy of Keats’s 1820 volume in the coat pocket, which he knew Shelley had taken with him. Then, after cremation in which Shelley’s heart, hardened by calcium, did not burn, this same friend snatched it from the embers and presented it to Mary Shelley, who kept it thereafter in her desk, wrapped in a copy of ‘Adonais.”
Here’s your morbid literary fact of the day.
jesus christ, i will never be this goth.
Mary Shelley’s father taught her to spell her name by taking her to the graveyard and having her trace the letters on her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gravestone.
NO ONE will ever be as goth.
didnt she also have sex on said grave
She lost her virginity on her mother’s grave yes
… that’s it we can all go home, peak goth was achieved before we even started.
JSTOR confirms it: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177447
Mary Freaking Shelley is None More Goth personified.
@mama-germany Achieve maximum goth
If I fail to reblog this, assume I’m stuck in my crypt, and someone needs to come help me.
She also wrote a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel focusing on the extinction of the human race and the meaninglessness of existence. In 1826.
Oh, and this isn’t especially goth, but my God, I respect her for this:
In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel’s lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as man and wife.[126][note 13] With the help of [American actor John Howard] Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple.[127]
The more I learn about Mary Shelley the more I love her
I mean makes sense that she was supportive of her non-straight friends because like she and her husband had an open relation ships and he definitely slept with other men (Lord Byron) and there’s a decent chance that Mary Shelley may have at the very least kissed other women
So she was an LGBT ally icon as well as the Mother of Science Fiction.
Adding her to my list of heroes.
(also @garrettauthor sorry I keep tagging you, but I feel you’d like this.)
Oh my god do I ever like this.
