Romantic Outlaws

They wondered aloud whether the dead could come back to life, and why Mary’s dead baby continued to appear in her dreams.

While she wrote the final paragraphs in March, she had been troubled by nightmares “of the dead being alive.” Her baby girl. Fanny. Her mother. And the most terrifying: Harriet, her hair streaming, floating up from the Serpentine, staring at the woman who had stolen her husband.

The two great poets had inflicted unspeakable pain, she believed, all in the name of freedom and passion.

But as a little girl, she experienced this viscerally, felt firsthand how creations can control their creators.

“A bad wife is like Winter in a house.”

In the 1831 introduction, she would describe the act of writing Frankenstein as a “dilat[ion].” She even linked the story to her own birth. The tale begins December 11, 17—, and ends in September 17—. (Although Mary did not provide the exact year, Walton sights the creature on Monday, July 31, and July 31 falls on a Monday in 1797.) Mary Wollstonec

Mary scorned the idea that being “delicate” made a woman more attractive.

They relied on the birth control system of the time: no sex for three days after menstruation, and then, since everyone believed that frequent intercourse lowered the possibility of conception, a lot of sex for the rest of the month.

Mary’s doubts stemmed from her deep reservations about the ability of human beings to improve themselves or the world. Evil, she felt, was lodged too deeply inside the human heart. Even those men who appeared to have the highest possible aims—truth, knowledge, liberty—seemed to her to be motivated by the desire for power and recognition, an insight