The Original Fire: On Mary Shelley and Creativity

I was seated on the library floor when I opened a copy of Mary Shelley’s journal and discovered the voice that would haunt me for weeks, months, and years to come. I was researching the summer Mary and Percy Shelley spent on the shores of Lake Geneva because I wanted to write an essay about, well, it doesn’t really matter. I forgot everything else after I read this entry:

Friday, Aug. 2 – I go to town with Shelley, to buy a telescope for his birthday present. In the evening Lord Byron and he go out in the boat, and, after their return, Shelley and Clare [Clairmont] go up to Diodati; I do not, for Lord Byron does not seem to wish it… 

That afternoon in the library on the floor I read through all her entries for the summer of 1816. It didn’t take long. Most of Mary’s daily entries have fewer than 20 words. She records with diligence the books she reads (and she reads a lot). She mentions more trips out on the boat, walks back and forth from the Villa Diodati, quick jaunts into town. But how she feels, what she hopes or fears or mourns—most of that is kept out. 

If you read it at a steady clip, this terse narrative feels quite modern, as if it was literary fiction written perhaps in the early aughts, maybe something by Coetzee or Ondaatje. You also get the sense that there is so much more going on than anyone is letting on.

*

In the foreword to the 1947 edition of Mary Shelley’s collected journals, editor Frederick L. Jones complains that many of Mary’s entries are too short, too self-aware. She’s cautious, impersonal. As if it’s somehow unfair that Mary kept back some of herself, rather than filling page after page with the guileless trust that no one else would ever read them. Because clearly she knew otherwise.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of two famous writers, each with cult-like followings. As a child, she watched her father William Godwin regularly receive guests at their home who ran the gamut from the wooly Samuel Coleridge to the wily Aaron Burr (“This family truly loves me,” Burr wrote of the Godwins in a letter). As a young adult, she reread on an annual basis her mother Mary Wollenstonecraft’s famous tract on the natural rights of women; Wollenstonecraft died less than two weeks after Mary was born. Mary would have been all too acutely aware of how powerful—and dangerous—words were; it’s no wonder she chose to record her thoughts only with great care.

Criticize her breezy approach to diary entries all you like, but judging by their longevity her methods served her well. She was an excellent editor of material, others’ as much as her own. She transcribed the poems for both Lord Byron and Percy for years. Later, after Percy drowned, she sifted through the shambles of his poetic detritus to fashion a corpus of posthumous books and poems. Her own first published book was History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, a travelog culled from her the letters and journals that she kept.

If you knew anything about Mary Shelley’s life before you began reading this then you almost certainly knew that she began to compose her famous novel Frankenstein while billeting beside Lake Geneva during a particularly cold and rainy summer. She and Percy rented a chalet that was a short downhill walk from the much larger, grander villa rented by Lord Byron. Their friendship with Byron, already a celebrity and something of a heartthrob, was a surprising new development. They’d never met before that summer. Mary and Percy were neither rich nor famous and were not really welcome in society, as it was. They were more or less in self-imposed exile from England, where they were shunned for Percy’s contrary views on marriage, religion, social mores, and most other genteel ideas. Here in Geneva they also did not have to hide from Percy’s creditors. They spent almost every day with Byron, and often stayed at his villa late into the night. I suspect Byron found them fascinating as specimens; for Mary and Percy it must have been a thrilling reversal of the treatment they got from high society back home.

Across the days and nights the group talked often of occult matters, including ghosts and spirits, and so it was not so strange when all of them agreed to write their own supernatural stories as part of a genial competition proposed by Lord Byron. It’s tempting to imagine that after Byron threw down the gauntlet, the talented young Mary shut herself away in her chamber and began to write her teenaged heart out. Pages and pages, for days and days, and at the end, boom: three volumes, a Modern Prometheus, a new literary paradigm, done and done. But that’s not what happened. That’s not how composition or creativity works. 

The process of writing is frustratingly non-linear. You race forward into enemy territory, then retreat, erase, revise, re-plan, and then dash forward again, trying to make more progress each time, but not always succeeding. At least this is my creative process: after I’ve settled on an idea that I want to write about, I stop writing. I walk around, thinking about the writing I want to do, but—and this is important—don’t do it. It bothers me, this idea that I want to write about but can’t yet put down on paper. That’s sort of the point. 

It doesn’t matter which genre I’m working in, the process is the same. I go for long runs, turning over concepts in my head. I daydream about sections I want to work on while on the train or waiting for a meeting to begin. Skeins of inquiry will grow and spread. I’ll note other things I need to look up, find out, learn. Trips to the library or long sessions searching the web for source material will ensue. Eventually, it’s too much: I have to start recording all the material I have mentally compiled. That’s how it worked with this essay about Mary. You gather and you gather and you gather facts and ideas and concepts and finally the only way to keep it all from overwhelming you is to begin to put it all down into words that exist outside of you. It’s not hard to imagine this is how Mary worked through her ideas, as well.

Unfortunately, if you go looking through Mary’s journals from 1816 in search of the entry for the day when the idea for her great novel struck, you will come up empty-handed. That’s not to say we don’t know when it happened. Thanks to other letters and statements we can deduce that she had the first clear vision for the book in June 1816. The trouble is: there are no journal entries for that summer earlier than July 20. In fact, there’s a gap from May 1815 through June 1816, as the volume with those entries went missing long ago. So we’re left to fill the gaps of what happened then by scouring the letters she wrote later in life or the introductions that she wrote for Percy’s posthumous books.

Luckily, what we do have offers a clear view of her creative diligence for the latter half of that summer. She offers scant mention of her overall project, how she feels about it, or what she hopes to accomplish with it; but it’s clear she is working at the devil’s own pace on something. Look no further than the opening words for each the entries for one week that August:

“Sunday, Aug 18. – Talk with Shelley, and write…”

“Monday, Aug 19. – Finish ‘Les Veeux Temeraires,’ write, and read…”

“Tuesday, Aug 20. – Read Curtius; write; read…”

“Wednesday, Aug 21. – Shelley and I talk about my story. Finish “Herman d’Unna” and write…”

“Thursday, Aug 22. – Write, and then go to town…”

“Saturday, Aug 24. – Write.”

This last entry is the entire text for that particular day. She was on a streak. Still, don’t be fooled into thinking this week was the moment when some of the words that later became Frankenstein were put to the page. Likely what Mary produced in July and August of 1816 was a few pages, a mere sketch. I imagine something like the typical treatment produced by a screenwriter in the early stages of film production: you don’t go forward with all the headaches and expenses and contracts unless you’re sure that the fundamental story is sound. This rough sketch is what she showed Percy at some point, presumably on August 21. Keep going, he told her. And so she did. In the beginning, this alone is all that separates successful ideas from failed ones: the will to carry on.

*

Published anonymously two years later, Frankenstein’s first print run was 500 copies, each bound in three volumes. You can find a photo of one of these books online. To the modern eye, it looks like three separate books, three slim novelettes. The front and back flap of each is pigeon blue, like an inky winter sky at dusk. The spines are the color of corrugated cardboard, and each has a label that reads: “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.” The price is listed as 16 shillings and six pence. In 2021, one of those first edition copies was auctioned by Christie’s for $1.17 million USD. 

What did Mary think of her accomplishment at the time? I went looking in her journals for a nugget of feeling or a telling observation that she made during the period after Frankenstein came out. The book’s publication date was January 1, 1818, and so I consulted her entry for the first day of that year. This is the entry in full:

“Thursday, Jan. 1. –  Read Tacitus; walk; write to Isabel [Booth]; read Hume. Shelley reads Gibbon.”

If she was excited, or worried, or pleased with herself, she doesn’t say so here. I flipped forward through the months, searching her entries for offhand commentary. Nothing. I found this so shocking that I switched to the index and confirmed, indeed, no overt references to Frankenstein on the pages that corresponded to those months. Finally, I backtracked to journal entries for December 1817, the month preceding the publication date. Finding more nothing, I made a note that Mary was reading Tacitus through December and much of the previous autumn. Tacitus has a famously concise writing style. He is capable of grandeur, but he is also capable of reserve. He speaks to his points and then moves on. Perhaps, I reasoned in my note, Mary was emulating his tone in her journals.

I was so pleased with myself for making this comparison that I almost missed the very thing I went to the journals to find. I was preparing to shut the book literally on her journal when I hit the entry for the very last day of the year, the day before Frankenstein came out. Here was what I’d been looking for all along:

“Wednesday, Dec 31. – Read Tacitus – Walk – S reads Gibbon – Fran[kens]tein comes”

I’m somewhat embarrassed with myself for missing this the first time. But in the creative process, even mistakes have value. I only noted the Tacitus connection because I spent more time reviewing entries than I planned. And the Tacitus comparison helps me understand the stoicism of Mary’s journals overall. She keeps track of events that matter, but she does not belabor them. In April 1817, she notes that she’s correcting proofs for Frankenstein. That September, she mentions the ongoing dickering with Lackingon & Co. on the terms to print the book. And she marks the day when the printed artifact entered the world. Then, she moves onto the next thing. There is, I think, some marvelously good advice for writers in that.

Thirteen years after the book was initially published, she wrote a preface to a second edition, where she elaborated on her feelings toward the book: “And now, once again,” she writes, “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.”

This preface is also where we find the book’s famous origin story. It reads not at all like her journals; instead, it feels like a scene out of Frankenstein itself: Once upon a time on a rainy night during an unnatural season, a great man of letters (Byron) declares to a group of his fellow intellectuals (Mary and Percy, among others) that they shall play God and create a version of life to rival life itself (for what is an original story but an attempt to improve on life as God made it?).

I have on my bookshelf a copy of the 1831 edition of her novel, and I also have a digital copy of the original 1818 text. I’m told that in a library at Oxford, if you have the right credentials, you can see two notebooks containing a handwritten fair copy of her book, presumably what she submitted to her publisher in 1817. There are also in the archives (again, for those with the right credentials) a series of loose pages that show previous versions, including the revisions that Percy suggested inline, his handwriting on hers. 

We have for her novel a remarkable record of the strange occult dance that is the creative process; everything, that is, except the very first part, the original germ, the text that Mary wrote that summer. Of her first, original idea, her actual work from that summer in Geneva, no copies exist that I can tell, although who’s to say what someone with adequate time and access to the deep vaults of Oxford could turn up. We know where she wrote her first sketch, and who was there, and we can guess even at the when—but the product of the initial inspiration itself, the original fire, it’s missing. Sort of like the beginning of any life, every life. You can know everything about where, how, and when you were born; someone could even have recorded every facet, every detail, every sound and smell and act. But it can’t bring that original moment back. 

There are many more pages to Mary’s journal—thousands more, if you include essays and letters and other published books. But I find myself drawn to the passages and entries that Mary made during the rainy summer of 1816. To the ebb and flow of that brief season, before she was old enough to know loss and doubt and regret, before she had managed to sustain a narrative for the full stretch of a novel. Back before she could be sure of anything. Before she knew whether or not she would be able to catch hold of an idea good enough to carry her forward. All young writers feel this way at some moment. Full of hope but also full of doubt. Kinetic and dull at once. Imagine being Mary Shelley: while she was still a teenager she caught hold of an idea big enough to carry her name forward 200 years and counting. 

Of course none of that was knowable back then. Certainly Mary had no idea, or at least none she chose to write down in her journal. She did note the day when the little group in Geneva broke up: August 29, 1816. Byron was headed onward into the Alps. Mary, Percy, their servants, and their baby boy all loaded into a carriage for the long ride toward France. Their goal was a packet ship that would return them across the Channel to London and all the headaches of their real lives.

The first leg of their journey over the land toward Paris took four days. In her journal for this period, Mary takes note of the precipitous terrain and the breathtaking landscape, details that she would later incorporate into the text of Frankenstein. But I like to think that she spent much of the ride staring out the window, lost in thought—and appreciating the heady thrall of this grand new idea that would not let her go. She didn’t write as much in her journal, but she didn’t have to.