Mary Shelley in Bath, introduced by Fiona Sampson, Manderley Press, £19.99

The birth of Frankenstein has become the stuff of literary legend. In 1816, the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – not yet Mary Shelley – travelled to Switzerland with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby son William and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. The unseasonably bad weather frequently kept them indoors at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron was staying with his friend and physician William Polidori. To pass the time on rainy days and stormy nights, Byron would read his guests a selection of hair-raising, spine-chilling German stories. On 16 June he suggested that each member of the group should try their own hand at writing a terrifying tale.

Polidori promptly got to work and produced The Vampyre. It would go on to be published in 1819 and pave the way for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Mary lacked inspiration and took her time getting started. When asked each morning if she had begun writing, she was forced to reply with ‘a mortifying negative’. Then, one night, after listening to an animated discussion between Byron and Shelley about ‘the principle of life’, death and the possibility of reanimating a corpse, Mary had a waking dream that finally stoked her imagination. ‘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,’ she wrote. ‘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.’ A seed was sown; Victor Frankenstein and the creature he constructs from dead body parts took root. The next day she sat down and started to write a story, one that would eventually see her not exorcising but actualising ‘the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow’.

As this Swiss sojourn helped spawn Mary Shelley’s most celebrated novel – one of the most significant in English literature – both the period and the place have received special mention in her life story. A new book shines a spotlight on another time and location that proved instrumental to Mary’s personal and creative development. Mary Shelley in Bath focuses on the next stage in the author’s life, in the months after she left Geneva. The book is a blend of fact and fiction: it offers biographical background, and it also gathers together for the first time in one volume her journals, letters and short stories written in, or inspired by, her stay in Bath from 1816 to 1817.

Two separate introductory pieces provide the necessary context. Mary arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816 with William and his nursemaid Elise Duvillard. Also in tow again was Claire Clairmont. It was partly because of her that Mary was in the spa town. Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s illegitimate child. Moving to London was out of the question for the stepsisters, as they would be at the centre of society gossip. (Mary had already courted scandal and been cut off by her father because of her unmarried relationship with Shelley.) Returning to her home at Bishopsgate on the edge of Windsor Park was also not an option for Mary, as Shelley had neglected to pay their bills and bailiffs had removed their furniture. It was agreed that while Shelley went to London to sort out their finances, Mary and her party would keep a low profile in Bath.

She found lodgings at 5 Abbey Churchyard, next to the Pump Room, and immediately adapted to a new pace of life. With no chaperone to escort her to the Assembly Rooms to mingle with fashionable young ladies of leisure, she undertook different pursuits. She extended her talents by taking drawing lessons. She broadened her mind by attending a course of scientific lectures at Bath’s Literary and Philosophical Society Rooms. Living above Meyler’s Circulating Library and Reading Rooms gave her access to books, and she devoured a great number of them, both in an attempt at self-improvement and to catch up with Shelley’s Eton and Oxford learning.

Mary’s journal entries from this time are often brief. In her introduction, Fiona Sampson calls them ‘clipped to the point of code’; in her 2018 biography In Search of Mary Shelley she describes them as ‘the barest of mnemonic listings’. But what they do reveal is Mary’s wide-ranging reading matter – everything from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Rousseau’s Letters from Emile. Some helped with the composition of Frankenstein: she drew on travel books to authenticate the Arctic expedition of her character Captain Robert Walton; she raided Humphry Davy’s Introduction to Chemistry for Victor Frankenstein’s scientific expertise; and she took from Paradise Lost her book’s epigraph about a creation confronting his maker.

Along with evidence of reading, Mary’s journals show she was regularly and assiduously writing. So, too, does her correspondence. In one letter she proudly announces an achievement: ‘Sweet Elf’, she addresses Shelley on 5 December 1816, ‘I have also finished the 4 Chap. of Frankenstein which is a very long one & I think you would like it.’ (The chapter, included in Mary Shelley in Bath, depicts an anguished Victor beholding the fruit of his labours, ‘the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life’.) Mary’s letters and journals also provide insights into her daily life and state of mind. She informs Shelley about their ‘dear child’ (or ‘little squaller’); she enquires about his progress with home-hunting and expresses her desire for ‘A house with a lawn a river or lake – noble trees & divine mountains that should be our little mousehole to retire to’; she tells Byron that Clairmont gave birth to a healthy baby girl and asks him to give Shelley an update on his ‘motions & enjoyments’; and she airs her impatience with Clairmont and her money worries.

These two troubles are eventually eclipsed by two tragedies. On 9 October 1816, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the first child of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum in a Swansea inn. Disaster struck again two months later when Shelley’s estranged, abandoned and heavily pregnant wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Mary articulates her regret in her letters. ‘Poor dear Fanny’, she writes to Shelley, ‘if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved for my house would then have been a proper assylum [sic] for her’.

‘Frankenstein can easily be turned into a biographer’s sandpit,’ argues Miranda Seymour in her biography of Mary Shelley. The material that makes up Mary Shelley in Bath demonstrates just how much of the author’s life in the city fed into the composition of her novel – from her reading to her cultural and intellectual environment to her outcast status. Above all, though, it is those two desperate deaths that cast a cold shadow over Mary’s book, infusing its narrative, its characters and its action. Samson believes Fanny may have been spurned by Shelley and sidelined by her family, and she detects her sadness in Frankenstein’s creature: ‘I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.’

Key elements and themes of the four stories included in this collection were also clearly influenced by Mary’s stay in Bath. ‘Transformation’ is a cautionary tale of ‘impious tempting of Providence’, in which Genoa-born Guido squanders both his wealth and his chances of marriage and is forced to make a pact with a loathsome ‘fiend’ while marooned in solitary exile. ‘The Mortal Immortal’ revolves around rejection in love and the desire for self-destruction. ‘The Mourner’ presents a young grief-racked woman painfully familiar with ‘the various woes that wait on humanity, on the intricate mazes of life, on the miseries of passion, of love, remorse, and death’. The heroine of ‘The Swiss Peasant’ is a lovelorn figure named Fanny.

Mary Shelley in Bath amounts to a captivating and illuminating record of a transformative time. We see how Bath was, for Mary, a sanctuary and a retreat from the world, a place of refinement and confinement where she wrestled with, and channelled, private sorrow, burgeoning ideas and societal strictures. If her journal entries are infuriatingly terse, then Sampson corrects the balance with an introductory essay rich in detail: at one point we are told that the view from Mary’s room ‘offered a glorious close-up of the Abbey’s West Front, where angels clamber up and down Jacob’s Ladder between heaven and earth: a proverb about aspiration and moral effort that could serve as a motto for Mary’s Frankenstein’.

Ahead of the latest adaptation of Mary’s trailblazing masterpiece by Guillermo del Toro, this new book gives context and clarity. It ably shows how a city and a set of circumstances shaped Mary Shelley and her talent, and gave fire to her modern Prometheus.