In Search of Mary Shelley

Sampson began her speech to the Hay audience by admitting her initial reluctance to publish a

literary biography, calling it a “hubristic” move to commit to the page the life story of a writer you

admire.

However, she equally saw it as a tantalising and irresistible concept – particularly since

Shelley herself wrote biographies during her career, once claiming that “the task of a biographer is

to collect the peculiar character” of a person.

With this in mind, Sampson has sought to document the life of Mary Shelley and the birth of her most famous and influential work, seeking to

“excavate her early life” in order to unpick its origins.

Reading aloud from the book, Sampson made a vivid case for the formative influence of the death of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, upon her later writings. Shelley’s life was pervaded by tragedy from the very beginning, and Sampson aptly noted that the young Mary was taught how to read by tracing her mother’s name on the tombstone.

An equally significant pillar of Mary’s life and adolescence was her meeting of and subsequent

eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley, when she was a rebellious 16 year old. Sampson denounced the

claim, however, that Percy had an overbearing amount of influence over the writing of Frankenstein,

arguing that there was “robust evidence to the contrary that he was a co-writer”.

Throughout the talk Sampson touched upon the enduring relevance of Frankenstein, as a work

which has shaped the polarising archetypes so present in popular culture and public consciousness.

She also praised Shelley’s literary voice in the novel, calling it a “young person’s work that is full of

freshness” even to the eyes of modern audiences.