The Graveyard Where Frankenstein Was Born

In the summer of 1814, seventeen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was already surrounded by death, books, and radical ideas. Her mother, the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, had died a decade earlier, days after giving birth to her. Mary would visit her mother's grave often, using the quiet churchyard as a place to read and think.

That churchyard belonged to St. Pancras Old Church, one of London's oldest religious sites, tucked away from the noise of the growing city. It became a strange kind of sanctuary for a girl raised on Enlightenment philosophy and grief in equal measure. Few places felt more her own.

It was there that Mary began a relationship with a married poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had come to admire her father's work and, soon after, Mary herself. Percy was already married, already a father, and already notorious for his radical politics and reckless personal life.

According to biographical accounts, the two are believed to have consummated their relationship at that very gravesite in late June 1814, using Mary Wollstonecraft's grave as their meeting point. It was an act loaded with symbolism neither of them likely missed at the time.

The pairing scandalized London society, and the couple fled the country together within weeks, eventually marrying after Percy's first wife died. Mary carried her mother's radical legacy of defying convention directly into her own life, quite literally on her mother's resting place.

Just a few years later, in 1818, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel obsessed with death, reanimation, and the boundary between the living and the dead. Scholars have long pointed to her early, intimate relationship with graveyards as formative to that fixation.

It's hard to separate the woman who wrote about stitching life back into a corpse from the teenager who began her own great love story in a cemetery. Mary Shelley's most famous creation may have started forming long before she ever picked up a pen.