When the young Romantic poet Percy Shelley met Mary Godwin, she was the teenage daughter of a famous trailblazing feminist, the long-dead Mary Wollstonecraft. The two of them shared a love of the mind—"Soul meets soul on lovers' lips," he wrote—but physical desire swept them away too, consummated near the grave of Mary's mother. When they ran away to Europe, it caused a major scandal, but the couple proclaimed themselves indifferent to judgment. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," she later said. They traveled together to visit the debauched Lord Byron, and Mary wrote Frankenstein during two weeks in Switzerland. After Percy died in a boating accident in 1822, Mary never remarried. She said having been married to a genius, she could not marry a man who wasn't one.
0 Comments