Mary Shelley On Creating Out Of Chaos

For thirteen years, Mary Shelley's novel was anonymous. When she finally put her name on it, she added a preface with advice on where creation comes from...

Feb 12, 2024

On the one year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s death, her son opened the box-desk she’d kept by her bed. It had taken an entire year before he could look at his mother’s things and he couldn’t bear to let anyone else do it for him.

Inside the desk, he found items he didn’t know she had. She’d never shown anyone. Not even him, her sole surviving child. Locks of hair from the siblings that died before he was even born. Three babies before him. None survived childhood.

A workbook she’d shared with her husband. Where they wrote together, editing and adding to each other’s words. Pages of poetry he’d written and she’d saved.

Inside the desk was a silken shroud she’d carried for years. It contained the charred heart of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the love of her life, and was wrapped in the pages of one of his last poems, Adonais.

He’d died at 29. Drowned when his boat was caught in a storm. His body not found for ten days and by then, identifiable only by the clothes he was wearing and the book of poems by Keats he carried in his pocket. When they cremated him, his heart would not burn. Today, physicians believe it may have calcified due the battle he had with tuberculosis. Instead of burying it with his remains, she carried it in a silk shroud.

Her life, up to Percy, had been utter chaos.

Her mother died in childbirth. Her father was a loving daddy, at first. But he remarried when she was four. Her stepmother hated her. Sent her away as often as possible. She spent her time reading on her mother’s grave. At fourteen, her dad put her on a ship to go live with strangers. Get her out of the way. To not annoy her stepmother.

Her life, after Percy, was utter chaos, too.

She was sixteen when she met him. Fell in love. She was hated by “polite society” because he left a pregnant wife for her and people said it was her fault. Home wrecker, they called her. Disowned by her father.

When they ran away together, she was sixteen and pregnant. The baby died in days. She didn’t wake to nurse one night. In the morning, Mary found her gone. Night after night she’d dream the baby was alive only to wake up and remember. Percy was there to hold her. When the first baby died. And the second. And the third.

When she wrote Frankenstein at eighteen, he encouraged her to turn her short story into a novel. Read her words over and over. Offering suggestions. Edited her writing just like she edited his. Only she could edit his work. Only he could edit hers.

When she first published her book, it was anonymously. She was afraid to put her name on it. Afraid it would kill the book, she was that hated by society.

For thirteen years that book had no author on the cover. Finally, she republished in 1831. Percy had been gone almost a decade. She put her name on the cover and added a preface. In part, the preface said…

“Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded…”

It’s a sentiment many authors have echoed. Hemingway said it most famously. In order to write about life first you must live it.

We all do, though, don’t we? We all live life.

Here is the problem. Too often, we judge ourselves for our chaos. For our messes, our shames and our struggles. And while we do that, hiding in plain sight is the advice written by one of the best known writers of all time. Written almost two hundred years ago in the preface to a book she finally had the courage to put her name on.

Creation does not come from a void. It comes from chaos. From the very feeling we try to stifle, hide or deny. I wonder what would happen if we embraced that.