Tag Archives: Lord Byron

Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?

!9th Century Seduction Scene -Byron and ClaireIn present times we tend to have a modern revisionist view of human behavior in the past. Some behavior in relationships and sex seems a constant from ancient forgotten times to the present, but the rules of society, the prism through which we view them as acceptable or taboo changes and shifts. What was common to men and women in days of old has new meaning in the age of #metoo. I was recently reminded of this in a discussion of the movie version of Mary Shelley. The thematic premise of which seemed to be how Mary was seduced by Percy only to find out later he was married, and Claire was seduced and abandoned by a libertine Bryon, and that Mary was deliberately denied credit for writing Frankenstein because she was a woman. While the question of credit due for Frankenstein’s authorship is a complex subject, especially in a time when anonymous publication was fairly common and the risk to social reputation was as much a consideration as any financial reward, and deeply bound in the difficult search for a publisher for a manuscript rejected several times, I’ll stick to the seduction discussion.

I find it odd that what is intended to be a feminist view of a patriarchy chooses to make women so weak in character that they are unable to make deliberate choices in their own lives, at the mercy of scheming cads. In the recent movie version of the story, Shelley and Mary meet in Scotland, she falls for him, then later discovers! he is married. And then, that Shelley encourages Mary to be pursued by Hogg in some kind of free love invitation which horrifies Mary when Hogg seems to chase her around the furniture. This architecture is inaccurate at best, and disingenuously revisionist.

Mary, of course, knew that Shelley was married before she ever met him. He was in continual correspondence with her father William Godwin, and supplying Godwin with financial assistance when Mary was as young as fourteen. Mary first met Shelley when he came to visit Skinner Street with his new bride, Harriet Westbrook. It was with Harriet that Shelley had eloped with to Scotland, where they married privately and then remarried in London at a formal ceremony, where the Godwins may have been witnesses. Percy Shelley had been a visitor to Skinner Street while Mary was away in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.

Harriet Shelley, as the aggrieved wife, accused Mary as the romantic schemer, writing at the time that, “Mary was determined to seduce him, she is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him.” This is hardly the picture of the unwitting naïve waif presented in the film version of the story.

As for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he was more infatuated with Shelley’s wife, Harriet, than he was with Mary. It had been Harriet who Hogg had pursued with an intensity of ardor that seems to be the inspiration for the chasing around furniture, and rebuffed by her. As for Mary, he was her confidante during the difficult days of pregnancy and the tragic loss of her first child, a time when Shelley was desperately dodging creditors. Shelley is notoriously on record as suggesting in the spirit of their shared philosophy of “free love”, that Mary could be with Hogg. Shelley meant this as an expression of freedom for her, that she enjoyed Hogg’s company and if they were true to their ideals he would not stand to the way. Mary rejected this idea outright, having no expressed desire for anyone beyond Shelley. If she did have a romantic thought for someone outside her relationship with Shelley it would have been Byron, with whom she seemed to share a sympathetic temperament and a respect of his talent. But any thought of a physical liaison had been tempered by her step-sister Claire’s difficult relation with Bryon.

In the film version, this is treated as Byron seducing and then abandoning Claire. However, it is much more likely that it was Claire who deliberately sought out Byron, who already had the public reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, from his scandalous affair with Caroline Lamb. Claire had an early infatuation with Byron as a famous figure of the time, like a modern girl might with a pop star. Claire (her actual given name was Jane, but she took on Claire as a romantic affectation), had an interest in the theater and sought an introduction to Bryon when he was a director of the Drury Lane Theatre. Drawing on her family connection to William Godwin and an introduction, very likely through Bryon’s publisher John Murray, she had delivered to him a copy of her, then and forever lost, unpublished manuscript of “The Idiot” or Ideot, written following the elopement trip with Mary and Percy, asking that he might consider it for a play and give her his reaction as a mentor, as many a young hopeful writer of today seeks out a peek at an over the transom unsolicited submission.

She went to see him to gain his response and later wrote of the sad treatment he had given as his reaction to her writing. Whether on this visit, he, like a Regency Harvey Weinstein demanded a sexual payment for her naïve theatrical ambitions, or instead, like a romantically infatuated groupie, she seduced him, I think is entirely open to conjecture. Claire had demonstrated a willfulness toward a sexual freedom notion of “free love” that was much more literal than the more intellectual ideas held by Shelley and Godwin, which was more about the financial strictures of legal marriage than it was about sex. In either case, the result was a pregnancy after apparently one brief encounter on a theatre office or London hotel residence casting couch.

It was Claire who then designed to pursue Bryon with the intent to snare his name in marriage with the evidence of the child growing in her. Claire suggested the trip to Geneva to introduce them to Bryon. Whether Mary or Shelley were aware of Claire’s intent is unknown, but it is clear that once the pregnancy was revealed to Lord Byron, he wanted nothing to do with a continued relationship with her. He agreed to financially support the resulting child, but his interest in the mother was less than nil. Byron’s temperament and Mary’s were much more compatible, and he likely felt much less a risk of his fortunes in a friendship with her than Claire.

Their friendship, even from afar, would continue until Byron’s death, with Mary caretaking the publication of his work along with Shelley’s, and a fondness in their Italy travels, even as Shelley’s relationship with Byron had become strained.

As for Shelley and Claire, whether he ever had a sexual relationship with her is also a matter of two-hundred years of conjecture. Mary herself insisted vehemently that they did not. Could she have been naïve about it, willingly blind, or just publicly defensive, protesting loudly to assuage the rumors? Maybe. Shelley clearly enjoyed Claire’s company at some level. She was less serious than Mary, more frivolous, and they could share ribald humor together that Mary chided as disgusting. Shelley was more amused by Claire’s antics than Mary, who seemed to view their life in each other’s constant company as mostly annoying. The salacious scandal rumors at the time among London gossips, the equivalent of tabloids, were that William Godwin had “sold” both of his daughters to Shelley, and every form of lascivious behavior was attributed to them. It had even been suggested that Claire’s daughter Ianthe was Shelley’s child and not Byron’s, but none of the actual participants ever accepted this.

Did Percy Shelley sleep with Claire or encourage an orgy of free love? This is a question Mary clearly answers in her Secret Memoirs, at least up to that point in her story and found at the heart of their journey.

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Lord Ruthven: John Polidori, Lord Byron and the Vampyre

John PolidoriWas the vampire invented in English literature from #metoo sexual abuse? Or maybe the trees?

The famous oft-told story of Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein, from the introduction of the 1931 edition, credits the introduction of the vampire in English literature to John Polidori, in his story of The Vampyre. But was the source and invention of a vampire character as a nobleman who drains his victims of life from Polidori, or should the credit go to Lord Byron himself?

It has long been suggested in the literary world that Polidori based the main character of Lord Ruthven in his story on his complicated, but brief, relationship with Byron, hinting at an unsatisfied sexual relationship between them and Byron’s lordly dismissive treatment of Polidori. The introduction to Frankenstein says that Byron’s contribution to the famous competition between himself, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Polidori at  Lake Geneva to each write a Gothic scare tale was a fragment of a story later appended to his Maseppa (by publisher John Murray without Byron’s permission), while Polidori struggled with a lame story about a voyeuristic peeping tom spying on a lady ghost through a keyhole, but then somehow miraculously came up with the rich and haunting, The Vampyre. It was a tale of a young man traveling with an older man who dies and mysteriously reappears again, while those they encounter die, drained of life. In the fragment of Byron’s story, called either simply “The Fragment” or “the Burial”, the main character is named Augustus Darvell. In Polidori’s version he is Lord Ruthven.

John Polidori, a few years following that summer in Geneva, committed suicide, possibly in some part a result of the dispute over credit for The Vampyre and a general despondency over the trajectory of his life. He drank cyanide in August of 1821. At least, that’s the generally accepted explanation of his early death, though the verdict of an inquest only stated the cause as “Died by the visitation of God”, with a glass of water by his bedside.

When The Vampyre was first published, the writing was attributed to Lord Byron and Polidori was dismissed. Was this entirely due to a prejudice from Byron’s fame? Or was there something in the story that indicated to those familiar with him that the story was actually from Byron? Let us give credit to John Polidori for writing the first published vampire tale, which surely inspired Bram Stoker’s later more famous vampire, but how much of it was Byron and where did it really come from?

The story was first published on April 1, 1819 (April Fool’s Day) by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine with the authorship as “A Tale by Lord Byron”. Polidori complained at the attribution, and Byron himself insisted that he was not the author. Polidori acknowledged that some elements of the story came from Byron, but insisted that the form and writing of it was his.

Was the credit given at first to Lord Byron deliberate by Henry Colburn? Polidori, in a letter to the publisher the day after the story’s appearance with Byron credited, claimed that the story had been sent to the publisher by a third party, a “lady”, and fellow traveler, presumably meaning Mary Godwin. Did the communication confuse or miss-identify the authorship? Perhaps in referencing that the story elements were originated by Bryon, Colburn assumed that the credit should be his. Or did the publisher just blithely believe the notorious famous name would attract more readers? When Polidori ultimately tried to settle with the publisher, rather than the £300 expected for a Lord Bryon piece, he was offered £30.

Perhaps Colburn believed the story was indeed by Bryon because of the character of Lord Ruthven. Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.

Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.

Why would Polidori name his character the same as Lady Lamb? Would he deliberately intend to poke Byron in the eye, and in the process doom himself to obscurity? Did he think it would sensationalize the story and thereby garner more attention? When Byron discovered his own fragment of a story published without his permission, he complained bitterly to John Murray at its revelation. Murray later would notoriously burn Byron’s autobiographical diaries as being too salacious. Would we have found there the answer to why he would begin a story, but so quickly abandon it, allowing Polidori to pick it up and run with it? We may never know directly from the Lord poet himself.

Who was Lord Ruthven? This mysterious noble who drains his young companions of their vitality is said in many scholarly references to be inspired by Lord Byron himself, but is someone else really the inspiration?

Henry Edward Yelverton was a British peer and the 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn. The title of Baron Grey de Ruthyn belonged to the Earl of Kent until it passed to the Earl of Sussex in 1717. The 18th Baron, the 3rd Earl of Sussex died in 1799 with no male heirs. The Grey de Ruthyn title then passed to a 19-year-old Henry, son of the Earl’s daughter, Lady Barbara Yelverton and her husband, Edward Gould. Henry took his mother’s name and the Grey de Ruthyn barony, but could not inherit the title of Earl of Sussex through his mother.

The Yelverton family was from Nottinghamshire and Henry, on inheriting his birthright, leased the estate of Newstead Abbey through Byron’s mother while Byron was at school at Harrow. On visits to the family estate with its resident tenant, at sixteen, Byron formed a friendship with the Lord Ruthyn (called formally Lord Grey with the Ruthyn left more obscure) in his twenties, and enjoyed hunting on the estate, but soon came a sudden and severe break between them, and with it a dark secret.

Lord Grey de Ruthyn and Newstead Abbey

The Newstead Abbey estate was leased to “Lord Grey” beginning in January 1803 until the young Byron was to come of age. In the summer of that first year, Byron stayed at the estate he’d inherited while Yelverton was traveling abroad. When Yelverton returned, Byron stayed on and didn’t return to Harrow for the fall term. He and Yelverton spent days and nights on “shooting expeditions”. Then, without explanation, the young Byron suddenly broke off their friendship and left Newstead Abbey. The reason for the break was so severe and drenched with bitterness that Byron wouldn’t reveal it even to his confidante, his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

He wrote to her, “I am not reconciled to Lord Grey, and I never will. He was once my Greatest Friend, my reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you, my Dear Sister, (although were they to be made known to anybody, you would be the first) but they will ever remain hidden in my own breast.”

Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon, widowed and perhaps thinking of a titled re-marriage herself, was intent on making a reconciliation between them, but Byron wrote again to his half-sister complaining about his already difficult relations with his mother, “all our disputes have been lately heightened by my one with that object of my cordial, deliberate detestation, Lord Grey de Ruthyn.” Byron’s later apologetic letters to Grey and Grey’s inability to understand his young friend’s breaking-off of their relationship it has been suggested might point to a sexual relationship encounter that Byron later regretted. They were never reconciled and in April 1808, Lord Grey left Newstead at the end of his lease.

A year later, in June of 1809, when Yelverton married an Anna Maria Kelham of Warwick, Byron wrote from Europe to his mother: “So Lord G— is married to a rustic. Well done! If I wed, I will bring home a Sultana, with half a dozen cities for a dowry, and reconcile you to an Ottoman daughter-in-law, with a bushel of pearls not larger than ostrich eggs, or smaller than walnuts.” The resentment was deep and long lasting.

Was Henry Yelverton the inspiration for Lord Ruthven? There was an actual Lord Ruthven from Wales, but he had no connection at all to any of the participants in this mystery. Why would Lady Caroline Lamb and John Polodori both name their character for a real person they didn’t know if they were intending on a thinly disguised literary rebuke to someone they both knew and had been left bitter. One might imagine that the dig was a double stroke. Bryon’s bitterness over whatever happened to sour him on Yelverton, was perhaps something he carried with him deeply, and in intimate relations with others he would complain about the older Lord who had taken advantage of him, and the naming of the vampire character who sucks the life out of people a joke by Bryon, known by Henry Colburn, and those of his circle, a secret so unmentionable it dare not be spoken. Henry Yelverton, Lord Grey de Ruthyn died in 1810, dead for six years by the summer of 1816, so he could not complain of slander as a fictional vampire in a fantastical story if he was framed as Lord Ruthven, so fair game.

Byron was at this very same time romantically infatuated with a series of girls in his boyhood days. His cousin Mary Chaworth, whom he spent many hours at the nearby Annesley Hall, who was the “beau ideal”  of womenhood in his youthful fancy, that he would later say he found “anything but angelic”  when she rejected him as “that lame boy”. His encounters with women left him disillusioned but romantic. Could his behaviors with men though his future life be the result of a molestation in his youth by a trusted friend? The answers, like so many interpretations of the lives of the romantics may need be divined between the lines.

Or could it have been the trees?

Visitors to Newstead Abbey up until the 1970s could have noted and remarked on the massive tree stumps which lined the drives. The stumps were obviously of great oaks cut almost to the ground. The guides of the time would tell that the trees were cut down by Byron’s tenant while he was away and sold for lumber. The stumps are long gone now, though visible in some aerial photographs of the estate and on old map diagrams. But the current caretakers, when asked, have no knowledge of them.

Did Yelverton, while renting the estate inherited by Byron have his trees cut down and sold, which Byron discovered on his return from a trip away? Or was this a later tenant? This is not entirely clear and the trees themselves have been removed from history like a vague memory. Would the joke on Byron be that he was so upset over trees? But why would this be a secret he wouldn’t reveal. If it was of a sexual nature, he wasn’t so reticent to mention these things to Murray and Hobhouse and others, so why so secret with Yelverton?

Is the first vampire in English literature about a young man being taken advantage by an older one, or is it a cosmic joke on the private rantings of the poetic Lord of Childe Harold over some intensely silly (to others) slight?

Favorite Castles of England and Wales

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Goethe and Frankenstein: Or, The Devil and the Dream

Goethe and FrankensteinHere’s an exchange from The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley when Mary, Percy and Claire are unexpectedly entertained in Switzerland from a local academic who has read Percy Shelley’s St. Irvyne, addressing him under the mistaken name from his pseudonymous “A Gentleman from Oxford” author identity.

“Monsieur Oxford, in your book—an outcast from society wanders in the Alps Mountains hoping for death. This is Wolfstein,” he began, giving the abstract and the main character’s name to the author as if he might have forgotten it. “He encounters an alchemist, the Rosicrucian, who promises him the elixir of life if his magic can raise the corpse of his dead lover, Magalena, from her tomb. But to do this, he must denounce his faith and deny his creator. They are struck by lightning and they are destroyed.”

The familiar story of the creation of the Frankenstein novel is a fireside reading of a book of Gothic tales and a nightmare dream on the lakeside of Geneva one summer. But the formation of the ideas of Mary Godwin’s book arose from her exposure to many influences, of Shelley, a collection of literary minds in the circle of her father’s acquaintances, and her readings, assembling the themes and events of her story from as many parts as her fictional creature.

But what role did Johann Goethe play in the writing of Frankenstein? And his friend, Friedrich Schiller?

When Victor Frankenstein encounters his creature who has been wandering and hiding in the Alps above Geneva, his unwanted creation tells of his education, how he read “The Sorrows of Werter”, “Plutarchs Lives” and “Paradise Lost”, books he found in a dropped leather satchel. It is from Werter, he learns the human need for love and connection, which so angers him with Victor for denying him, it drives him to murder and revenge.

Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Goethe

Today, Goethe is more familiarly known for his play of “Faust”, the doctor who trades his soul for a deal with the devil, but Johann Goethe’s early masterwork “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young student so obsessed with a love he cannot have that he commits suicide, was the “Catcher in the Rye” or “Hunger Games” of its day in the late 18th Century, a popular story that reached out to the young, so melancholy that it was blamed for a wave of suicides. The creature in Frankenstein expresses the profound effect the story had on him, which is the author’s expression of the effect it had on her, so much that in it can be found her own inspirations.

“I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder…”

But the reading of his book was not Mary Godwin’s only connection to Goethe. At the time of her formations of ideas that would permeate her novel, the German classicism was infusing the English literature world, inspiring the romantics of her world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a regular of the literary society of her father, William Godwin, and a familiar acquaintance of Mary and Shelley, had been one of the founding sources of this.

Coleridge had learned German on a trip to Germany in his younger days, along with his friend William Wordsworth. Coleridge had encamped for a few months at Gottingen University, where he learned the language and listened to lectures and made side trips. He utilized this on his return to England to launch his literary career by translating to English his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallenstein”.

And though he did not translate Schiller’s play of “Wilhelm Tell” he translated a poem “Tell’s Birthplace”. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin had been so influenced by the story of Wilhelm Tell it had inspired their elopement trip to Switzerland in 1814, to the beauty of the Lake Uri locations of Schiller’s story, where they had hoped to live away from the clucking tongues of English society, until they ran out of money. Shelley had even expected his wife and son might come and live with them in an egalitarian communal paradise.

Schiller was not Coleridge’s only influence on Mary and Percy. About the time of their elopement escape, Coleridge had been approached by publisher John Murray II to produce a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Coleridge was struggling with his own particular demons at the time, his long addiction to Laudanum, and his doubts about his own work with a tendency to begin brilliant works and never quite finish them, like Kubla Kahn, even going so far as to add: Or, a Vision in a Dream, A Fragment to the title, after Byron and friends convinced him publish it.

Coleridge would surely have been well acquainted with the literary circle of Darmstadt, the German Romantic movement “Circle of the Senses”, much like the literary circles of the English publishing world of John Murray, and of Madame DeStael at her Chateau Coppet in Geneva, visited by Bryon and Shelley in their travels around the lake.

The Darmstadt Circle was organized around the literary lights of Johann Merck, Gottfried Herder, and Christoph Wieland. The German authors had been translating works of Shakespeare and Cervantes into their language, as Coleridge had been the German works to English. Goethe, born in Frankfurt had served briefly as a magazine editor in nearby Darmstadt with Merck, before trying to revitalize his legal career in Wetzler, where he was inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own passionate attraction to an unattainable girl to write Young Werther.

Had Coleridge heard of the story of the strange activities of the one-time inhabitant of the Frankenstein Castle at Darmstadt, the college lecturer-alchemist and occult dabbler, Johann Conrad Dippel, from his travels in Germany? Coleridge may have readily been introduced to Dippel’s Oil, a malodorous concoction made from distilled animal parts, claimed as a universal medicine (meant to be rubbed on and not swallowed.) But by Coleridge’s time in Gottingen, the medicinal qualities of the Dippel’s Animal Oil had been largely dismissed and perhaps turned into somewhat of a joke after his chemical formulas had found a use in cloth dies. Mostly now only known for his tangential relation to the Frankenstein Castle, Dippel had written almost seventy works about his chemistry in German by the time of Coleridge’s studies at Gottingen.

Coleridge never published his English version of Faust in his lifetime and only later has what is believed may be his unfinished work been discovered. Mary Godwin also began a book before Frankenstein that she never finished, she called Hate, and what secrets of her sixteen year old heart it held may never be known. But why would she chose a German name for her French speaking Genevan characters of: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus? Not only were they French Swiss, but Victor Frankenstein’s father was Italian. Confusing?

Wallenstein, Wolfstein, Frankenstein, and some smelly creepy medicine for a pregnant young woman author, expressing her exposure to the lofty thoughts and influences of the circle of contemplative minds surrounding her. Constantly pressed for an explanation of where she got the idea for her story, if a vision in a dream worked for Coleridge to explain Kubla Khan, why not for Frankenstein?

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“Mary Shelley” to Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the movie, (formerly Storm in the Stars) has been announced as the Saturday Night Gala Premiere film for the Toronto International Film Festival, held from September 7 to 17, 2017. Toronto is one of the most commercial festivals on the International circuit, launching films like the Academy Award winning “Room” and horror film “Cabin Fever”.

The film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley was filmed on location in Dublin and County Wicklow, Ireland and Luxembourg, was shot in Ireland with funds from the Irish Film Board by Parallel Film, the same company behind Soairse Ronan’s’ “Brooklyn”.

Mary Shelley tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing but yet finding inspiration when she meets Percy and is struck by love, but Percy is married with a child (actually it was two). Mary soon becomes pregnant with Percy’s child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and grieving for their child, they depart from London and Percy introduces Mary to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva and the a stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein Creature story. Mary struggles to find a publisher and must fight for her monster and her identity.

The film also stars Douglas Booth as Percy, Maisie Williams as Mary Scottish girlhood friend Isabel Baxter, Bel Powley as Claire, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane as the parents, and Tom Sturridge as the mad, bad Lord Byron. The original script is by Emma Jenson with Alan Maloney and Ruth Coad producing for Parallel Films with Amy Baer of Gidden Media who originated the project.

The story covers some of the same ground as “The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Romantics” but skips lightly over the 1814 elopement trip and jumps to 1816 to 1818.

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Did Mary Shelley and Jane Austen ever meet?

Jane Austen and Mary ShelleyAn interesting question, as these two most prominent women authors who have survived in popularity to today were being published as contemporaries. There is no known record or mention of one another in their writings and they were not in the same public circles. But it is a tantalizing question anyway.

Mary Shelley recorded most of what she read in her diaries, and there is nothing regarding anything of Austen. She occasionally lists “read novel” without further comment, either having no effect on her, or not taking them seriously. Shelley’s recorded interest in reading tended much more to the classical and philosophical, than the popular. And they were almost polar opposites in life experience and artistic sensibility. Austen came from a country life and wrote of themes of obtaining a good marriage and keeping a good name, in a comedic tone. Mary Shelley spent her formative life in a city environment surrounded by radical philosophers and her work was intellectual and dark, with tragedy at its core.

Yet, there are intersections of commonalities. Mary Shelley wrote her famous work when she was eighteen years old and revised it over years. Jane Austen wrote the first drafts of her most prominent works when she was twenty to twenty-two and revised them over years.

Austen began her first novels in the form of a series of letters. Shelley begins Frankenstein as a series of letters. Austen’s parents were from Bath and environs, and she lived there for several years. Mary Shelley’s parents were from Bath and she lived there for several months.

Okay, these are curious intersections, more having to do with the nature of women authors in their times. Could they ever have been in the same society? Austen lived in Bath from 1800 to 1809; Shelley wasn’t a resident until 1816.

Austen was being published in her lifetime beginning in 1811 until 1816. The first publishing of Frankenstein was in March 1818, several months after Austen had died on July 18, 1817. But yet, there are some connections where, if not encountering in person, they could have been aware of one another. Beginning with that summer trip of 1814 to France and Switzerland, Mary’s diaries made a fairly precise record of what she read daily, even in the circumstances of the greatest tragedies, but what she was reading before that is not detailed, and she was an ardent reader.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility first appeared in October 1811, published by Thomas Egerton. It had favorable reviews and the novel became fashionable among the young aristocratic class and the first edition sold out. And like Mary Shelley, it was first published anonymously. Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813, was widely advertised, and sold well. Mary Shelley was the daughter of publishers and surrounded by writers. She was beginning her early attempts at writing at least by 1812. Surely she must have been aware of a successful authoress, though her peers may have looked down on work like Austen’s. The kind of societal focus on marriage central to her stories was the philosophical opposite of Mary’s father’s ideas. Even Austen’s most formative works included a satirical sendup of the kind of historical biography William Godwin was writing, though he would not have seen it. While William Godwin himself did read an Austen work, mentioned by him well after her death.

After Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park came out in May of 1814, at about the time Mary and Percy Shelley were becoming involved and her step-sister Jane (Claire) was taking an avid interest in the fashions of the time. Austen’s third novel was not-so-well reviewed but sold out. Austen’s writings became popular enough that the Prince Regent was counted as a fan and reportedly kept a set of her novels at his residences. In mid-1815, Jane Austen changed publishers from Thomas Egerton to John Murray for her anticipated new novel Emma.

Austen had occasion to come to London in November of 1815, when the prince’s librarian, the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, invited her to visit Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence, and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming novel Emma to the Prince. Austen resided at 23 Hans Place in Knightsbridge while in London corresponding with Murray regarding a special limited edition of Emma dedicated to His Royal Highness, to be issued before public distribution of the novel.

Whether she visited the publisher while in London is not recorded, but Murray was well known for his salons of prominent writers gathering for meetings at his 50 Albemarle Street address in Mayfair. It was nearly the epicenter of the London publishing world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friend of the Godwins and the Shelleys, was also being published by John Murray II, and William Godwin had many dealings with him as a writer and publishing competitor.

John Murray was the publisher of Lord Byron. The Shelleys became good friends with Bryon the summer of 1816 and on their return to England from Switzerland, Shelley took on the task of supervising the publishing of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Third Canto with Murray. Austen had completed a draft of Persuasion (The Elliots) in July of 1816 with the intention of publishing with Murray but was having financial difficulties with the failure of her brother Henry’s bank in March of 1816.

Austen was dealing with John Murray by correspondence while her brother may have been the conduit of manuscripts, though she very likely did meet the publisher in person, at least enough to write in a letter to her sister Cassandra in October of 1816, “He is a rogue of course, but a civil one.” This was at the same time Shelley was complaining to Murray that he had not been dealing appropriately with the proofs of Childe Harold which Byron had entrusted to him and may have visited Murray that October in London while he was staying in Marlow and meeting with Leigh Hunt.

In 1818, Bryon needed money. His library was valued at £450 and included in the inventory was a 1st edition of Emma, probably given to him by Murray, their common publisher. He was permanently traveling away from England by that time, but published in December of 1815, Bryon would possibly have been aware of it when spending time with the Shelleys in Geneva. And even though it was published with no author name, Murray would possibly have commented privately on the author’s identity to his other client. So, would Lord Byron have discussed the work of a female author with Mary Godwin when she was aspiring to write, especially an author who’s themes on marriage were so antithetical to Mary’s family influences, while she herself was risking her reputation in an unmarried relationship with Shelley?

Austen’s health was failing in 1816. She completed two revision drafts of Persuasion by August of 1816. She began another work, Sanditon, but stopped writing in March of 1817. She died on July 18, 1817 in Winchester. Percy Shelley began submitting the draft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in note book form to publishers beginning in May of 1817, first offering it to Murray, then to Charles Ollier, both of whom declined to publish. Percy Shelley did not reveal at the time who the author was, only saying it was the work of a friend. It was finally accepted by George Lackington of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, printed in November of 1817 and formally published with anonymous author in March of 1818.

So, did Mary Shelley meet Jane Austen? It’s hard to prove a negative. Could she have been encouraged or inspired by the success of a woman author of her day like Jane Austen? She never mentioned it. Was Jane Austen familiar with Mary’s mother’s writing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, when Austen was 17? She never mentioned it.

William Godwin published his memoir about Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, when Jane Austen was at the height of her creative energy, writing about the fear of loss of reputation when one of the pre-eminent woman authors of the day found her reputation sent her into the dustbin by the resulting scandal of the baring of her affair with Gilbert Imlay and illegitimate birth of her daughter. There is some suggestion that an acquaintance of Jane Austen’s father was a friend of the Wollstonecraft family, and the salacious scandal of the daughter of the eminent author and radical philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a friend of the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron could not have escaped her. But she never mentioned it. After all, it was far from Austen’s country world of polite manners, and probably best not to mention it.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Nightmare AI: Can Artificial Intelligence Machines Learn to Scare?

frankenstein_gloopy_twirlDr. Stephen Hawking and others have warned about a future where AI could reach a point of existential risk where humans are at danger from machines that out compete human intelligence. This is an idea expressed in movies like “The Terminator”, and have been around since the deep themes of man verses science in the first appearance of Frankenstein. But just in time for Halloween, the geeky researchers at the Media Lab of MIT are asking you to decide if AI machines can figure out how to scare you out of your candy, in what they call the Nightmare Machine of “Haunted Faces” and “Haunted Places”, computer generated scary visions powered by deep learning algorithms.

mit_ai_facesThe concept is to hand the computer algorithm a photograph, it could be a bucolic scene of sunsets and landscapes or a happy smiling face and the program will hand back a creepy manipulated vision intended to give you the shivers. So far, this nightmare device only offers demonstration versions and does not let visitors submit their own images. Currently, they have provided a set of demo photographs that have been morphed from a standard photo to the machine’s idea of what is unsettling to the human eye. For the demonstration they have landscaped settings with various themes like “slaughterhouse” or “alien invasion”. Faces have been twisted into screaming maws of twisted teeth and haunting soul-forsaken eyes. Some of the imagery is perhaps no more scary than a Vincent Van Gogh painting of flowers on Clozapine, but others are decidedly chilling creep outs. The AI machine learning comes in as visitors to the Nightmare Machine are asked to choose which images frighten and which don’t, so the computer algorithm can learn what truly frightens you.

To what use this scare machine will be put to in the future is a curious question. So, far it is mostly research in the next wave of AI, but in practical application will it be a funhouse graphics trick to sell Halloween season greeting cards from Hallmark’s Frankenstein collection, or will it be turned to the dark side of psychological warfare of the machines against the humans in the coming war for domination by Skynet’s robotic overlords.

ada_lovelace_blue_sqMary Shelley’s story explored the theme of the unintended consequences of scientific advancement and curiously by a degree of separation was connected to what might be called the first step in artificial intelligence. Lord Byron, now forever connected in literary mythology to the origin of Frankenstein from the stormy summer on Lake Geneva is also the connection to the origins of AI. Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace), George Gordon Byron’s only legitimate child by his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, found an interest in  mathematics, and in 1840 wrote the first computing algorithm for Charles Babbage’s Analysis Engine.

This was a “machine” which only existed on paper, but fueled Alan Turing’s imaginings of a mechanical device which learned the Nazi enigma code, and in 1956, Lovelace’s notes on what she called “poetical science” imagining individuals using technology as a collaborative tool, in rather a reverse of her father’s friend Mary Shelley’s darker vision,  inspired Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT’s AI Lab, and a handful of other futurist thinkers gathered at Dartmouth College to begin the evolution of AI. At that other creative gothic summer, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a competition was held to create programs which could emulate learning, beating humans at checkers and even formulate sentences in English. It is apocryphal that the first computer uttered sentence was: “Trick or Treat?” How’s that for a Halloween scare? Watson, we need you. Try it out at  Nightmare MIT

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Frankenstein in Frozen Yogurt and Waffle – the Franken Fraffle

franken_fraffle_sloan.jpgIt’s been 200 years since the story of Frankenstein was first envisioned in a fever dream of an 18 year old girl’s imagination, and countless movies, plays, novels and Halloween scares have followed, but you’ve never really “arrived” as a true cultural icon until someone names a FroYo treat in your honor. In the novel, the Frankenstein creature made of reanimated worm food escapes to the frozen arctic, but since the ice of the arctic is melting, making a frozen dessert of sweetened cream and amoebas seems just and appropriate.

London’s most indulgent British frozen yoghurt parlour, the Sloane Bros. Frozen Yoghurt Co., is opening its first location outside of London, in the Intu Victoria Centre of Nottingham, not far from Shelley friend Lord Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. To further its unique philosophy of combining British tradition and innovation and to celebrate 200 years since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the Sloane Bros. have introduced a new product intended as a treat on a treat on a treat, featuring its thick and creamy British-sourced fat-free frozen yoghurt accompanied by scrumptious toppings and freshly made waffles. The creature of Shelley’s imagination had no name, but this one does, christened the Mighty Franken’ Fraffle®.

Just like the famous monster sewn together of parts imagined in a dream by its literary progenitor, taking their customers’ love for both the company’s “froyos” and freshly-made waffles, the Sloane Bros. scientific team put their heads together one dark and stormy evening and in a flash of waking vision they came up with the ultimate indulgent treat and a monster was created! But a sweet creature combining all their tasty sweet treats. And it’s trademarked so no-one else will ever name anything the Fraffle, at least until Universal buys it and teams it up with the WereWoffle®. I just trademarked it, so stay away.

The Sloane Bros.’ creamy frozen yoghurt, freshly made waffles and thick refreshing smoothies are available at both the company’s London Brick Lane and Nottingham’s Intu Victoria Centre locations. And as the Frankenstein creature himself might say “Fire bad…Fraffle Yoghurt Goood”!

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Lord Byron Returns to Chillon in 2016

At least until August 21 in

1816-1820 Byron is back ! Lord Byron’s Return

byron_chillon12016 is the 200th anniversary year of the romantic poets and Frankenstein inspiration in Switzerland. A number of events and exhibits are being offered to celebrate the “romantics summer” of 1816.

Lord George Gordon Byron visited the shores of Lake Geneva for five months in the summer of 1816, from May through October. It was a busy and auspicious time for English Literature. While staying at rented estate, the Villa Diodati in the Cologny suburb of Geneva, and joined by new friends Mary and Percy Shelley, came the now famous origin of the Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron produced his haunting Prisoner of Chillon, inspired by the beautiful castle which guards the eastern lake shore at Montreux, (called Clarens in the days of the romantics).

chillon_castle_sunriseWhile the tale of the ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati which is the common telling of the origin for Frankenstein, of which one is reminded of the line “when the legend becomes the truth, print the legend” is being celebrated with its own 200th Anniversary at the Bodmer Foundation Library in Geneva, the trip of Byron and Percy Shelley around the lake is less familiar and the Chateau Chillon is presenting its own temporary exhibition to celebrate the 200 years since the visit of the poet to its dungeons which inspired him to write of the priest held captive as a political prisoner. The aim of the 2016 bicentennial summer exhibit is to offer an homage to the man who ignited the romantic travel desires of the reading public to follow in the footsteps of the literary pioneers who described beautiful far-away places with such emotion.

Read Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley for the real love story origin of Frankenstein

During the five months stay at Lake Geneva from May 20 until October, the Shelleys and Bryon who had not met previously, became good friends that summer. Mary dedicated the first edition of Frankenstein to the “mad, bad, dangerous to know” poet and Percy Shelley and Bryon rented a boat to explore around the lake. The stop at the Chateau Chillon was brief, like any tourist’s visit might be, but the stories he heard of Francois Bonivard and his treatment in the hands of the Savoys caused him to begin his Prisoner of Chillon verse tale while staying on the Ouchy Riviera of Lausanne.

The “Byron Experience” Exhibition

byron_chillon_bookDuring the special exhibit a self-guided tour of Castle Chillon with present the experience of Byron through documents, rare publications and objects presented in context with a collection of evocative images to present visitors with the scope of work left to us by Byron, the rock star of his age. The exhibition has original and exceptional documents and objects on display lent by various prestigious institutions, including the Geneva State Archives, the National Library of Scotland and the University Library of Lausanne. Among the objects, is a manuscript of “The Prisoner of Chillon”, which was hand copied for Byron by Mary Shelley’s step-sister Claire Clairmont, who was pregnant with Byron’s daughter Allegra at the time. He didn’t get along with her, but she was dutiful to him. Also present is a first published edition, as well as numerous original editions written by Lord Byron.

For touring the sites visited by Bryon and Shelleys, and writing of in their journals, the exhibit offers an “Alpine Journal” guide, to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron’s and explore the alpine landscapes of which inspired those first tourists so enchanted by Switzerland, that remains an inspirational today as it was 200 years ago. The exhibition is in French, English and German.

A combined ticket is available to see the Summer of 1816 exhibits around the lake, including 1816-1820 Byron is back ! Lord Byron’s Return at Chillon Castle and Frankenstein: Creation of Darkness at the Bodmer Foundation Library.

Other Events in Switzerland celebrating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bryon

mary_shelley_bellinzonaSeveral events are being held in 2016 and 2017 to celebrate Lord Byron and the friends coterie of the friends’ stay in Switzerland. The Musée du Léman holds an exhibition, Wanted! A la chasse sur le lac will be open until January 8, 2017. Byron himself appears in a large fresco by the artist Aloys. In Italian speaking Switzerland, just beyond the newly inaugurated Gotthard Base Tunnel, the Sasso Corbaro Castle of Bellinzona presents an exhibition about Mary Shelley & Frankenstein through the end of July.

For more about  Chillon Castle and Bellinzona in Favorite Castles of Switzerland

From 26 August, a musical comedy version of “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” will be presented at the Grand-Champ theatre in Gland before moving to Geneva. While in Geneva, the Musée Rath has organized an exhibition called “Le retour des Ténèbres” (Return from the Darkness) around the myths of vampires and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster which will run later in the season from December 2, 2016 to 19 March 19, 2017, while the Brocher Foundation Research for the Future of Human Being and Society in Hermance, Switzerland also has an exhibition cycle called 1816-2016: the Frankenstein Bicentennial and symposium June 14-15 on Frankenstein’s Shadow: A Bicentennial Assessment of the Frankenstein Narrative’s Influence on biotechnology, medicine and policy

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Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley's Lost Book HateThe story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”

But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?

At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.

There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?

In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.

This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?

And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

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A Storm in the Stars Film Shoots

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Douglas Booth as Shelley

The Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley biopic “A Storm in the Stars” has begun production in Ireland, with Elle Fanning as Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, Douglas Booth as Percy Byssche Shelley and Bel Powley as Claire Clairmont. The cast has been spotted about Dublin in costume, rather shivering in the cold weather, despite woolen coats and cravats, while the recent casting of Ben Hardy has been announced (it’s unclear whether he is playing Byron, Polidori or Hogg), and Ciara Charteris is playing Shelley’s first wife Harriet, who committed suicide before Percy and Mary could be married.

 

The film is being directed by Saudi-Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour following her acclaimed debut film “Wadjda”. The film’s story from a screenplay by Romance novelist Emma Jensen with co-writing credit by Irish writer Conor McPherson, follows the period in the saga when Claire moves in with the Shelleys for the writing of the novel of “Frankenstein”, and the young author’s tempestuous love affair with Percy Shelley, the infamous and familiar trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, Claire’s illegitimate child with Bryon and all the drama surrounding the rocky road that turned Mary into a legend. Filming has been spotted around the Collins Barracks in Dublin. The film should be released late in 2016, at least to the festival circuit. No US theatrical distributor has been announced, while international sales are being handled by the UK’s HanWay

The period of this film takes place after the journey of Mary, Percy and Clairmont to France and their early relationship explored in The Frankenstein Diaries, The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley. Douglas Booth is currently appearing in another Regency era literary mashup “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. Elle Fanning most recently appeared in “Trumbo”.

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