Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster

Frankenstein, one of the darkest tales ever told,

was born in a nightmare.

From a 19-year-old girl whose life was full of demons came a monster who terrified generations to come.

-MALE VOICE

-I am the fallen angel.

Misery made me a fiend!

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in Switzerland at the beginning of the 19th century.

Today her story is known all over the world.

Based on her own words and the people who knew her,

this is the real story of Frankenstein's monster.

-MAN:

-It was a murderer, fresh from the gallows at Newgate.

He gave it an electrical shock.

The jaw, facial muscles contorted horribly.

One eye actually opened.

It seemed to everyone it was being restored to life.

-Papa.

-Oh, Mary.

What are you doing? Come here, come here. Oh-h!

-What's the matter?

-Dead people,

-they don't come back to life, do they?

-No. No, no, no.

Mary Shelley lived in an age of unprecedented scientific discovery.

At the start of the 19th century, biology was the new science

at the very cutting edge of intellectual inquiry.

But people believed that electricity and magnetism could bring the dead back to life.

As a child, Mary had heard of experiments to reanimate hanged convicts.

The holy grail was the source of life itself.

It was an experiment, that's all.

It was just an experiment.

Go on.

Mary adored her father, the brilliant philosopher William Godwin.

She was born in 1797 and grew up in troubled times.

After the mob stormed the Bastille in Paris, Europe was unstable.

In this country, there was social unrest and talk of revolution.

Godwin's book about justice for everyone became a bible to British radicals.

Government is the perpetual enemy of change.

Its tendency is to perpetuate abuse, but truth must always be victorious over error.

For truth is omnipotent. And man is perfectible.

Mary Shelley's intellectual gene pool was a rich one.

Both her parents were revolutionary thinkers.

Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the founder of feminism.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a unique woman,

beautiful, fierce, independent.

Before her marriage to Godwin, she had already travelled the world alone

and had had an illegitimate daughter.

Her book, A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman, is still taught in colleges today.

Remember, this is years before the Suffragette movement.

Even by today's standards, her philosophy is still radical.

From the tyranny of man,

I firmly believe the greater number of female follies proceed.

Let women share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man.

For she must grow more perfect when emancipated.

Mary Wollstonecraft was loved and respected by Godwin, by her friends, by her followers.

Mary, my love, here we are. This will make you feel better. It will cool you down.

When Mary Shelley was born at home, her mother tried to feed her, but she was too weak.

There we are, Mary. There, there. Is that good?

-Is that good Mary-Mother?

-(It's too cold. Take it away.)

All right.

BABY GRIZZLES

-Oh, dear!

-Mary, please let me take her. ..Come on, baby.

Come on. There, there. It's for the best, Mary.

There we are.

-I have her now.

-I can't bear this.

I know, I can't bear it either, my love.

Dear Mary!

When Mary Shelley was just 11 days old,

her mother died of puerperal fever, the killer of so many women during childbirth in the 19th century.

She was 38.

Mary always knew that, however innocently, she had caused her own mother's death.

William Godwin was hugely admired, even hero-worshipped,

especially by his young disciples.

One of the most outspoken was the 21-year-old poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

He was the bad boy of Oxford University.

For some time, he had been writing long letters to Godwin.

I am young. I am ardent in the cause of philanthropy and truth.

Do not suppose that this is vanity. I am convinced that I could represent myself

in such terms as to be thought not wholly unworthy of friendship.

Shelley, a very serious young man, wanted to change the world.

He spent his life protesting against privilege, marriage, the Church, inequality and everything.

There is no God.

Earth groans beneath religion's Iron Age and priests dare babble about a God of peace!

Godwin had read out Shelley's letters to his family.

So Mary had heard about him long before she ever met him. And Shelley had heard about Mary.

On the 5th of May 1814, he visited Godwin's bookshop in London's East End

in the hope that he might meet his hero's beautiful 16-year-old daughter.

Dante's Inferno.

-Is hell an interest of yours?

-I am improving my Italian.

Oh, you must have it back, then.

-You were at Oxford.

-Oxford(!)

-They threw me out.

-An independent mind can be a dangerous thing.

'Mary is singularly bold, somewhat imperious,'

and active of mind.

Her desire of knowledge is great and her perseverance in everything she undertakes

is almost invincible.

Mary was Percy's soulmate.

He took her almost as seriously as he took himself.

Percy hadn't just fallen for Mary, but for her radical pedigree.

She'd inherited her mother's mane of golden hair and her fierce intelligence as well.

The memory of my mother has been the pride and delight of my life.

And the admiration of others for her

has been the cause of most of the happiness I have enjoyed.

The meeting between Mary and Percy set in motion a chain of events

that brought great happiness and terrible tragedy.

Percy was already married, so their love affair had to be a secret one,

and all the more exciting for that.

They met in St Pancras graveyard in North London,

at the grave of her mother, the great radical and advocate of free love.

Always appear what you are,

and you'll not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings -

love and respect.

-Let not...

-"..the Spring-tide of existence pass away unenjoyed.

"Gain experience

-"while experience..."

-"..is worth it."

This behaviour would be taboo to most people, but not to Mary.

She'd been nurtured on ideas more familiar to hippies of the 1960s

than to your average 19th-century youth.

This was probably Mary's first sexual experience, but Shelley had been at it for quite some time.

He was already married to 18-year-old Harriet Westbrook.

They had one child, and another was on its way.

All the more shocking was that two weeks after his wedding, he was writing...

Marriage! It is as if a dead and living body had been linked together

in loathsome and horrible communion.

Mary wasn't put off by Percy's heartlessness.

Whether she knew or cared about his wife at this point, we don't know.

This was, after all, her first love.

THUDS

My God, Percy!

Mary's father was furious.

However radical Godwin was, his daughter was only 16 and Shelley was married.

He banned them from seeing each other.

Take this.

What is it?

Drink it.

Together, Mary.

No, Percy.

Common sense got to Shelley before the bullet did, but he was distraught.

Later that night, he took an overdose of laudanum.

His two suicide attempts had failed.

If he was going to live, he had to be with his soulmate, whatever the cost.

It's a measure of how much Mary was in love that she was now about to defy her father so dramatically.

Their relationship would never be the same again.

She loved Godwin dearly, but personal freedom was at the heart of Godwin's philosophy and hers.

At first light, Mary crept out of the house.

Shelley was waiting for her.

But, strangely, someone else also crept out of the house that night.

-Percy!

-At last!

Now we can live as we wish!

And Clare.

-How happy we will be.

-Yes, how happy!

Godwin had remarried when Mary was four years old.

Her step-sister Clare Claremont became a dubious friend

and arch-rival for Shelley's affections. Shelley had plans.

Free love was an idea that was being bandied around at the time by radical thinkers,

but Shelley didn't just want to think about it, he wanted to do it.

Love is free.

To promise forever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.

Shelley was planning to set up a commune with as many women as he could muster,

including Mary, Clare and his poor abandoned wife.

Clare was usually game for anything. For the next eight years, she'd be a thorn in Mary's side.

The three young romantics set off.

This was a very dangerous thing for Mary to do. She was risking her reputation and her life.

This recklessness and independence which brought Mary and Percy together

would, in time, drive them apart...

and bring out the very worst in both of them.

That evening, they set off across the English Channel

in a small fishing boat manned by two sailors.

Before daybreak, a huge storm rose.

They feared for their lives as the rolling waves crashed into their boat.

But, somehow, they made it to Calais.

The whole trip was an adventure for them.

Heading for a fashionable resort in Switzerland, they travelled along the Rhine,

where they heard the strange story of Konrad Dippel, an anatomist who had dabbled in the dark arts.

They say he used to steal bodies out of graveyards and inject them with a strange concoction -

-blood and bone, I believe - to bring them back to life!

-It is all legend, Mary! All nonsense.

But the story struck a chord in Mary's imagination.

In English, the castle said to be Konrad Dippel's birthplace was the Rock of the Franks.

In German, that's Borg Frankenstein.

Mary had found the name for the story she would later write

about the doctor who brought the dead back to life.

"Whence, I often ask myself, did the principle of life proceed?

"I beheld the corruption of death succeed the brim of life.

"I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of eye and brain..."

Konrad Dippel and the experiments Mary had heard of as a child haunted her imagination.

The controversial anatomist Luigi Galvani had performed a famous public experiment

which brought a new word into the language. To galvanise - to give life to.

This is very much a dead frog.

Those twitches aren't life. They're just caused by the muscles moving

as a result of the electrical current to the nerves.

But to a 19th-century audience, this was life itself manipulated at the hands of a scientist.

Small wonder that Mary Shelley's hero, Victor Frankenstein,

was a doctor seeking the ultimate truth about life.

At the turn of the 19th century, medicine was not the respected profession it is today.

Dissection was illegal, except on the bodies of hanged murderers.

As a result, there weren't enough legal corpses for anatomists to dissect.

Grave-robbers often filled the gap.

This gruesome trade in dead bodies inspired Mary.

And so she made her hero, Dr Victor Frankenstein, an anatomist.

"Who shall conceive of the horrors of my secret toil

"as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave

"or tortured the living animal to animate lifeless clay?

"I collected bones from charnel houses

"and disturbed with profane fingers the tremendous secrets of the human frame."

When Mary returned to London from her elopement in 1814, she was pregnant.

Godwin refused to have anything to do with her.

She wasn't able to understand why her father was disappointed

that his little girl was pregnant by a married man.

Why will he not follow the obvious bent of his affections and be reconciled to us?

What am I to do?

This was a terrible time for Mary.

Still a child herself, at just 17 she gave birth to a baby girl two months prematurely.

The baby was to die shortly afterwards.

She was left with a haunting dream.

I think about the little thing all day.

I dreamt that she came back to life, that she was just cold...

..and that, before the fire, we rubbed her and she came back to life again.

Then I awoke and I found no baby.

So young and so much experience of death.

You can see why this young woman might need to dream of bringing the dead back to life.

All the circumstances in her own life and in the world around her

were preparing her to write Frankenstein.

The triangle of Mary, Percy and Clare

was becoming even more bizarre now that Mary was in mourning.

Percy seem to need Clare as much as he needed Mary.

She was younger, more gullible, fun to tease.

-Did you hear that?

-What?!

The silence.

Percy was the son of a baronet but, after the elopement,

his father withdrew his allowance, except for the occasional handout.

Mary was feeling the strain of poverty and pregnancy.

Less than a year after she lost her first baby, her beloved son William was born when she was 18.

He brought great joy to their lives,

but the first flush of love had passed and tensions were mounting.

In 1815, Clare had left the cramped little room she was sharing with Mary and Shelley

and had gone to Devon.

It's possible that she gave birth to Percy's baby there -

it was quite common for women to disappear to the country to have illegitimate children.

But Clare said nothing of it. She just noted in a letter that she was grateful to get away from...

So much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion and hatred!

Clare had her eyes on a much bigger prize than Percy Shelley.

Famously described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know",

he was Lord Byron, superstar poet and adventurer.

One breast laid open were a school

Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine...

or rule...

I waited for you for nearly a quarter of an hour last Thursday. In your draughty hall.

..And their life A storm whereon they ride...

I only did it because I love you so.

..Melt into calm twilight

And so die.

Clare insinuated herself into Byron's affections for a while,

but he was more interested in the infamous couple Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley.

He invited them all to stay at his villa in Switzerland, and everywhere that Byron went,

prying eyes, scandal and adoring women followed.

This is the infamous Villa Diodati.

Here, Byron was watched and talked about.

Scandalous rumours about incest and orgies abounded.

Tourists used to come and look at the villa through their telescopes!

Byron's dangerous charisma worked its magic on the three young people.

No matter how callous and dismissive he was to become in later years,

they always came back for more.

At the villa, he gathered them around the fire with his handsome young doctor, John Polidori.

Opium and laudanum were the drugs of choice.

For these impressionable young people, this was exciting and a little bit scary.

Few moments in the history of literature have been more romanticised

than the summer of 1816, when Lord Byron entertained his friends on the shores of Lake Geneva.

They called it "the summer of darkness".

Storms raged, and the surface of the lake shuddered with the force of the thunder.

LOUD THUNDERCLAPS

THUNDERCLAP

It does FEEL ghostly here.

To have a ghost, a man -

or woman - must have a soul.

You are not the only one here with a soul, Albe.

< No...

but you are the only person here without one.

Percy...

And then, one stormy night, Byron read aloud from Christabel,

the Gothic horror poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

"There she sees the damsel bright, Dressed in a silken robe of white,

"That shadowy in the moonlight shone -

"The neck that made the white robe wan...

"..The vision of fear, the touch and pain!

"She shrunk and shuddered and saw again...

"..Why stare she with unsettled eye?

"Can she the bodiless dead espy...?"

It bores me, all this "bodily dead"

and "shrunken, shuddering" superstition.

Really?

Could any of US write a more thrilling ghost story?

Well?!

Mary took the ghost-story challenge seriously. Probably, she was the only one that did.

Here she was, just 18 years old, in the company of these two geniuses.

At least, Shelley and Byron THOUGHT they were geniuses.

So the story that she was to write had to be impressive,

enough to make these two great men shiver with fear.

I busied myself to think of a story

that would speak to the mysterious fears of our natures,

one to make the reader afraid to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.

If it did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.

A few days after the ghost-story challenge, Mary was to have her famous dream.

'When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep nor could I be said to think.

'My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me.'

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, upon the workings of some powerful engine, saw signs of life.

The morning after her dream, Mary announced that she had thought of an idea.

She started writing immediately.

Frankenstein himself tells us about the monster's creation,

beginning with one of the most famous lines in English literature.

"It was on a dreary night in November that I first beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

"How could I describe my emotions at this...catastrophe?

"I thought I had selected his features as beautiful.

"Beautiful(!)

"Good God!

"His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.

"His watery eyes!

"They seemed almost the same colour as the white sockets in which they were set.

"Later, I started from my sleep with horror.

"Cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered and every limb became convulsed."

Mary was brought up by her parents to believe that all children must be loved and cherished,

that the powerful must care for the weak.

In this, the key moment of the book, Frankenstein's rejection of his creation

is against love and reason.

He comes into the world an innocent.

At first, Mary describes him as a "creature", not a monster.

It is loneliness and suffering which makes him wicked.

"All night, I have been walking up and down in the greatest agitation,

"listening, catching each sound as if it were to announce the approach

"of the demonic corpse which I have so miserably given life."

RATTLE >

A great proportion of the misery that wanders in hideous form around the world is allowed to arise

from the negligence of parents.

What's really incredible is that Mary Shelley was so young when she wrote Frankenstein,

just 19 years old.

And the monster, lonely and desperate,

in many ways is a nightmarish reflection of Mary's own turbulent life.

CREATURE SCREAMS

At the Villa Diodati, Mary found the heart of her novel

but high in the Alps about 60 miles from Geneva, she found a place for the most horrific scene of all.

Mary made the treacherous journey to come here.

It's the Mer de Glace, one of the most dangerous places in the Alps.

It's criss-crossed with crevasses and constantly prone to avalanche,

but Mary was determined to come here.

She called it "the most desolate place on earth".

A perfect setting, then, for the most desolate creature on earth.

The creature's tragedy is all wrapped up in the times Mary lived in, and her parents' philosophy.

The French Revolution showed that if people are brutalised, they'll be brutal themselves.

So it is with the creature.

He is feared and loathed by everyone who sees him.

His sadness turns to fury.

"I am the fallen angel.

"Where I see bliss, I am excluded.

"I was benevolent and good.

"Misery made me a fiend!"

When she returned to London, Mary drew on her own life and fears as she wrote.

William was still a baby.

In her story, she gave Frankenstein a much-loved younger brother, also called William.

But even this innocent child cannot abide to be near the monster.

In a fury of revenge and despair, the monster kills him.

The bloodbath has begun.

He flees to the mountains for refuge, the only place he will be truly alone.

"The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge.

"The caves of ice are a dwelling to me.

"These bleak skies I hail..."

Back in London, tragedy was about to strike again.

An unknown woman was found dead yesterday in the upstairs room of the Mackworth Arms in Swansea.

An empty bottle of laudanum and a note were also found.

Not Fanny! Not Fanny!

-It seems so.

-Oh, no!

Oh, no, it IS her!

I know it is her!

Fanny was Mary's older half-sister,

born illegitimately to Mary Wollstonecraft before she met Godwin.

Fanny had always been in Mary's shadow.

After her suicide, Mary was pained with guilt for neglecting her.

She must have been thinking about Fanny as she wrote the monster's words...

"But where are my friends and relations?

"No father had watched my infant days,

"no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses.

"Or if they had, all my past life was now a blot,

"a blind vacancy."

Mary Wollstonecraft had tried to kill herself twice.

Mary inherited her mother's melancholic streak

but, to protect herself, often withdrew emotionally.

The monster is Mary's misery made flesh.

MARY: Loneliness has been the curse of my life.

What should I have done if my imagination had not been my companion?

I must have grovelled on the earth, I must have died -

but my dreams,

my darling, bright dreams.

Just two months after Fanny's suicide, the couple were dealt another devastating blow.

Harriet, Shelley's abandoned 21-year-old wife, was found in the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

At eight months pregnant, she'd drowned herself.

There were rumours. Was the unborn child Shelley's?

It was certainly possible. But he had his own story.

She was driven from her father's house, and she descended the steps of prostitution

until she left with a groom of the name of Smith,

until he deserted her.

And she killed herself.

Wherever Shelley went, children followed.

There were his two motherless children by Harriet.

With Mary, he had one surviving child, William.

A third was on its way, and two more to come,

and now Clare was pregnant.

The father was almost certainly Byron. HE suspected it was Shelley.

Free love certainly had its price.

For all his heartlessness over Harriet's death,

Shelley was keen to stand by his now motherless children,

and Mary, barely able to support her own family, was happy to welcome them into her home.

But there was something they would have to do first.

Like many conscientious objectors to marriage, before and since, Mary and Percy tied the knot.

Against all their commitment to free love,

they recognised that his claim for custody of his two children

would be all the stronger if he was married.

Dancing in attendance was Mary's father, another champion of a woman's right not to marry.

Marriage, as it is now understood,

is a monopoly.

And the worst of monopolies.

Godwin may have objected to marriage in theory,

but when it came to his daughter, it was a different story.

He had not spoken to her since her elopement, but at her wedding, they were reconciled.

Mary and Percy were still in love when they married in 1816.

Here is another biographical connection to Frankenstein.

Love is at the very heart of the book.

The monster longs for it, as Mary did.

In the Alps, he demands that Frankenstein makes him a bride.

"I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realised.

"I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself.

"Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless.

"This, you alone can do."

Frankenstein at first refuses to make the monster a mate,

but he is threatened with the worst imaginable horror.

"Do your duty towards me,

"or I will fill the belly of Death

"with the blood of your remaining friends."

Terrified that the monster will slaughter his remaining loved ones,

Frankenstein begins the awful process of making the female creature.

"So I proceeded in my labour.

"It became, every day, more horrible to me.

"It was indeed a filthy process.

"My heart sickened at the work of my hands.

"Am I right for my own benefit to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?"

Unable to contemplate the evil he will unleash if he continues, Frankenstein destroys the female.

-CREATURE:

-"You have destroyed the work that you began!

"It is well,

"but remember,

"I shall be with you on YOUR wedding night."

The monster is true to his word.

On their wedding night, Frankenstein's young bride is strangled in her sleep.

To stop the bloodbath, Frankenstein knows he must destroy the monster.

It was almost impossible for women to get into print in the early 19th century.

Shelley, posing as the writer, managed to get Frankenstein published anonymously in 1818.

Only 500 copies were printed, but they were passed around the great and the good in literary London.

What began as a playful challenge from Byron

was about to become one of the most famous books in the world.

Mary and Shelley were to look back at the summer they spent with Lord Byron on Lake Geneva

as their own romantic idyll - the mountains, the lakes, the poetry and the conversations -

but they were never able to recapture that.

Mary had lost her mother, her first baby and her sister, but far worse was to come.

BABY CRIES

Mary and Percy's lives were becoming a soap opera of births, marriages and deaths,

often involving Byron.

They now had two children - William and a baby girl, Clara.

Clare also had a baby, Byron's daughter.

In a complicated conspiracy to unite father with child,

they all travelled to Italy to be nearer to him.

But in an act of astonishing cruelty,

Byron wrote to say that a messenger would collect "the brat",

and that Clare should never see her again.

No, it's too cruel!

No.

Ignore it.

Clare couldn't ignore Byron.

The baby was taken from her and died five years later, alone, in a Catholic convent,

consigned there by Byron himself.

Despite his cruelty to Clare, Shelley didn't give up on Byron.

He set off with Clare to stay in Byron's house near Padua.

Mary's baby daughter was ill,

but she made the long coach journey to join them.

In the 19th century,

dysentery was rife on the Continent.

Three weeks after Mary's journey, Clara died of the disease.

They buried her

with a single flower

on the beach near Venice.

"There is not a tree

"that I would not recognise

"as a memorial of that moment...

"when life and death hung in my arms."

The irony was that, during this personal tragedy, the fortunes of her book were rising.

Mary heard from a friend that Frankenstein was "universally known and read".

She felt it was time to admit that she was the writer.

Her fame and the fame of her tragic monster was growing.

Are you all right, little Willmouse?

In 1819, Mary's beloved son William -

or Willmouse, as he was known - was everybody's darling.

Here's your flower.

Just a little longer. There now.

Mary was concerned about the fever William was developing.

Just three weeks after this portrait was painted, William also died of malaria.

He was three years old.

"He was so good,

"so beautiful,

"so entirely attached to me.

"It should have been me that died. It should have been me!"

Mary couldn't shake off the pain of William's death. To Percy, she was barely recognisable.

In a poem addressed to her, he grieved at his loss.

My dearest Wherefore hast thou gone?

Thy form is here indeed, A lovely one.

But thou art fled.

Gone down the dreary road

That leads to sorrow's Most obscure abode.

For thine own sake, I cannot follow thee.

'Do thou return for mine?'

Mary could not forgive Percy for recovering so quickly.

To her, it was a betrayal of their lost children and her love.

"A cold heart.

"Have I a cold heart?

"God knows."

Mary's life was unimaginably hard now.

Too much death, too young.

Some people noticed that she was becoming cold and unfeeling.

"At least the tears are hot."

Was she, like Frankenstein's creature, being hardened by suffering?

The monster's words could describe Mary herself.

"I am the fallen angel.

"I was benevolent and good.

"Misery made me a fiend!"

The loneliness that Mary had imagined in Frankenstein was taking hold of her own life.

At their new home, the desolate Villa Marini,

the sea washed in under the arches and the wind howled around them.

For Shelley, this was wonderful.

He could indulge his life-long love of the sea.

Mary hated it.

Now, where did we get to, Percy?

As the marriage disintegrated,

all Mary's love was devoted to her fourth child,

Percy, the only one who would survive into adulthood.

One, two...

"Mary feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind.

"It is a curse of Tantalus that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind

"can no longer excite my passions."

Mary.

I leave tomorrow.

Percy, don't drip on the floor.

Passion or no passion,

Mary was sick, and miserably pregnant again for the fifth time.

And still only 24 years old.

A woman is not a field to be continually employed

either in the bringing forth or the enlarging of grain.

I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.

On the 1st of July 1822, Shelley set off with a friend in his new boat, the Don Juan.

He was visiting Byron in Livorno, a journey of some 65 miles around the north-western coast of Italy.

Mary heard nothing for several days.

She set off with Clare to Livorno and waited.

A sudden summer storm had engulfed Shelley's boat.

Three days later, two bodies were found.

Shelley was identified by the copy of John Keats' poems still in his pocket.

He was 29 years old.

"For eight years, I communicated with freedom with one whose genius far transcended mine.

"Now, I am alone.

"Oh, how alone!

"Oh, my beloved Shelley!"

Shelley's body was burned on the beach near Livorno.

There is a strange connection here with the book.

At the end of Frankenstein, the monster imagines his own cremation.

Mary wrote it years before,

but it's as if the monster is crying out for Shelley.

"Soon, these burning miseries will be extinct.

"I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly

"and exult in the agony and the torture in flames.

"The light, that conflagration, will fade away.

"My ashes will be swept

"into the sea."

Frankenstein ends as if Mary didn't know how to resolve her epic horror.

Vowing to destroy the monster after it kills his bride,

Frankenstein pursues it to the frozen wastelands of the Arctic.

There, he perishes mysteriously,

and the monster disappears into the darkness.

HOWLING-WIND EFFECT

Oh, dear!

-AUDIENCE LAUGH

-You're frightened out of your wits!

-WIND-HOWL EFFECT

-What's that? What's that?

At this, the lowest point of Mary's life,

Frankenstein was at its most successful.

Back in London, Presumption, Or The Fate Of Frankenstein

played to huge audiences.

But this monster was more farcical than tragic.

The roots of the monster most people think of today are probably here rather than in Mary's tragedy.

Behold, the horrid corpse to which I have given life!

The story of Frankenstein had taken on a life of its own.

But, despite this success,

Mary couldn't escape the melancholy which plagued her for the rest of her life.

Agh!

AUDIENCE APPLAUD

Feeling guilty that she had allowed Shelley to sail into that deadly storm, Mary transformed her life

into an act of reparation.

She struggled to get Shelley's work published and have his genius recognised.

You mentioned Mr Keats in your verse, but you don't mention Percy.

Don't I?

-Well, Percy was the best, the least selfish man I ever knew.

-But...

as a poet?

Let's go on, shall we?

Byron never did mention Percy in his verse. But Mary persevered.

Without her determination to establish him,

it's possible we might not know the name or work of Percy Bysshe Shelley today.

The fond memories of that fateful summer in the Villa Diodati never left Mary.

She returned there 11 years before her own death. Everything had changed.

Byron had died two years after Shelley, when he was 36.

Clare was now living the uneventful life of a governess.

Frankenstein, for all its horror,

was a story born of youth and vitality.

How far Mary had come!

Mary went on to write other books,

but none haunts the imagination like Frankenstein.

This young woman, at the peak and fire of her youth, dared to break convention by writing a book

that would strike fear into the heart.

Mary dared to write about bringing the dead back to life,

but she learnt the very hardest way that death is final.

"The windows of the room were darkened, and I felt a kind of panic

"on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon.

"The shutters were thrown back

"and, with horror, I saw at the window a figure most hideous and abhorrent."

Mary Shelley died herself in 1851,

aged 53.

Subtitles by Elspeth Kane & Carla Rossi - BBC Broadcast 2003

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