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Mary Shelley

9 stories mention Mary Shelley on DeadlyCurious.

The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Villa Diodati, Cologny

The Volcanic Summer in Geneva When Five English Tourists Agreed to Write Ghost Stories and Two of Them Invented Modern Genres

In June 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that his five guests each write a ghost story. The volcanic winter from the Tambora eruption had ended summer in Europe. Mary Godwin, 18, wrote the opening of *Frankenstein*. Dr John Polidori wrote *The Vampyre*. Modern science fiction and modern vampire fiction began in the same villa in the same week.

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The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Viareggio Beach, Tuscany

The Adventurer Who Cremated Shelley on an Italian Beach and Made the Mythology of It

Edward John Trelawny organised the August 1822 beach cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's drowned body at Viareggio. He kept Shelley's heart (rescued from the funeral pyre, supposedly) and spent the next sixty years substantially writing and substantially fabricating the canonical English version of the Shelley-Byron Italian Romantic decade.

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The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Protestant Cemetery, Rome

The Twenty-Five-Year-Old English Poet Who Died of Tuberculosis in Rome in February 1821

John Keats arrived in Rome in November 1820 in the hope that the Italian climate might arrest his advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. He died at the apartment on the Spanish Steps three months later, aged 25, having written essentially all of his major work in the previous three years. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery near William Shelley.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · New Burlington Street, London

The London Publisher Who Took Mary Shelley's Plague Novel After Everyone Else Refused It

Henry Colburn was the early-19th-century London publisher who specialised in commercially difficult books — silver-fork novels, exiled-author memoirs, controversial political diaries. He published Mary Shelley's *The Last Man* in 1826 when no other London house would touch it, serialised Disraeli's early novels, and went bankrupt twice while doing so.

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