October 30, 2025 • 41 mins
On today’s episode, Karen covers Mary Shelley and the gloomy summer vacation that led to Frankenstein.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, we're so excited to be sharing the trailer for
our brand new show, Brief Recess, a legal podcast with
Michael Foot and Melissa Mautbranch.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You may know Michael as the immigration lawyer from TikTok
who gives an insider's perspective on the legal system, usually
with way more humor than it deserves. And Melissa has
spent her career as a nonprofit leader, a writer, and
most importantly, Michael's best friend.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
And together they discuss real life legal issues that affect
us all. It's smart, hilarious, and it makes the law
accessible in a time when we all need to know
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So stick around after this episode of My Favorite Murder
to hear the trailer for Brief Recess, premiering Thursday, November thirteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
And you can follow Brief Recess now on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Goodbye, last hello, and welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's
(01:04):
Georgia hart Stark.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
That's Karen Kilgareff, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
For a moment from the road.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
We are in the midst of our tour. Let's see
when this goes up we'll only have two cities left.
Can you believe that? Just on la which is insane.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, it feels like it was just a gleam in
our eye and now it's almost over.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
What's your favorite moment? I know what your favorite gift
is from the road you do? Yeah, we haven't talked
about this yet for some reason.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Favorite moment.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I did enjoy kicking that stuffed animal back out into
the audience after they threw it at us.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
That's right, someone threw up like a big plushy and
it rolled on to the stage like a grenade.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
It was very scary.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It was a very surreal, quiet moment that we just
stared at it and we didn't know what to do,
and then Karen just took two steps and punted it
back into the audience.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I mean, one of my proudest moments. What about yours?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Well, I was going to say to you. Do you
remember when someone in the me and greet very early
on was a dentist and brought you the little scrub
oh tooth brush toothpaste thing from think after you get
your teeth clean.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It was the most meaningful gift, Like what you know,
the real gift is people actually hearing you when you
say things right. He came up and he's like, I'm
a dentist, so I brought you the gift that only
I can give you or whatever. You know.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
His little speech was, yeah, that you asked for an
episode like two hundred something.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, where the story of me asking my own childhood
dentist that when I was like ten years old. And
he just started laughing. He's like, what are you talking about? Yeah,
and then he was like, I'm a dentist and I
got it for you.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
He gave you a baggie like full of dental scrubs of.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
This scrubbiest tooth polish that I can't really use it home.
I don't have a polisher, but oh, I'm so glad
you reminded me of that.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
That was so incredible.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
That was really good.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone for coming to the show
so far. They've been just absolutely incredible. To come back.
I just having not done that in six years, I
forgot what it was like to walk on stage with
people screaming at you, and it is just like unlike
any feeling you'll ever have. I'm assuming like giving birth
is like that. I don't know, I'll never know.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I think it's a lot louder than giving birth, although
who am I to say?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A lot more fun so good, So like I do.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Think it's that electricity that you can only get in
that situation. It's easy to go like, oh yeah, I
remember and whatever, but it's like, once you're doing it,
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
I find it addictive. I love it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, I'm worried I'll be like chasing that high for
the rest of my life once yeah, this twenty years
when this all ends, All right, what do you got?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Well, let's see. Oh, can I read you this email
that's from a listener from a story I told about
pulling up behind somebody that actually had an SSDGM bumper sticker.
So I got to see it in real life. And yeah,
it was the first time. Well, someone wrote in and
this subject line is Karen hanked at me, and it says,
let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It was a weird day.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
I was brushing home from work because I got a
call that my wife was in a bike accident. And
then it says she's okay, banged up in ruse, but okay.
I was just focused on getting to her at the
urgent care off pass avenue. I exited the one thirty
four pass, Oh my god, and was letting my mind
go to dark places.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
One Hong Kong. H that was weird. Who's honking?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I look in my rear view mirror and the woman
behind me is waving. Okay, weird. The light turns green
and I'm making my left turn and Hong Kong Kong.
Now said woman has her window rolled down and she's
waving emphatically. She's smiling, so she must not be pissed
at me for something I've done. In my confusion, I
waved back because it's the polite thing to do.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh my god, this person having an actual emergency, and
you were like you were concerned as to why they
weren't paying attention to you, but they were literally having
an emergency.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I demand that you talk to me about my podcast,
no matter what's happening in your family. Okay, it says.
I turned left into the parking lot and she kept going.
I figured I'd never know what the hell that was about.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Him, didn't even know it was you.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Oh my god, No, that's this is hilarious.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So cut to a few weeks later, and I get
a frantic text from my friend Anne, and then it
says quotes was this you? And then she sent me
an Instagram post where Karen describes her version of this encounter.
I wish I'd realized it was Karen, even though I
was in the middle of a weird, damn life sucks
sometimes moment. It would have lifted my spirits, even for
just a passing moment. Oh that's nice, Karen, if you
(05:19):
see me again, a new honk. I promised to be
as joyful and excited as you looked last time.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh, oh my god, I can't believe we get on
the other side of this story.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Hilarious. And then it says my friend Amber and I
will see you ladies in Pasadena. Can't wait.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Will be the ones waving in the middle section XO
xo kat See. We gotta wave with them, We gotta
say hi to them. That is yeah, the sweet I mean,
what a horrible and yet thank god it wasn't you
know it turned out okay?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, man, But just to have that happen while you're
having a panic attack, essentially, oh.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
My god, it's a real act out of you never
know what other people are going through, and it's like.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Hong Hong Kong Hey, Hong Kong conger you alright, Hong Kong.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
All right, should we do some highlights?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, we have a podcast network called what's it called
exactly right Media. That's right, I'm so tired. Here are
some highlights.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Okay, So tomorrow Buried Bones, we'll have a very special
bonus episode from the High Seas. Live from the Virgin
Voyages Crime Cruise, Paul and Kate take on one of
their most requested cases ever, the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Whoa.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
You can watch the full episode on the exactly right
YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash exactly right Media, or
you can listen to the audio wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Wow, what a show. Speaking of YouTube, a brand new
Halloween episode of MFM Animated premiered yesterday. Head over to
the exactly right YouTube channel again, YouTube dot com, slash
exactly right Media to watch child Devil out.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Now we got to see Nick Terry in Seattle.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Here's the greatest is and Episode five of our newest
series Hell in Heaven, producer with Blanchard House and iHeart Podcasts,
is out today. It is a hit podcast. It's so exciting.
This thing shot up the charts and you should listen.
One gunshot, one body, and a mystery that only gets
stranger from there. It's Helen Heaven.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And in honor of this week's episode of rewind, we're
re releasing our classic Triflers need Not Applied merch design
from twenty seventeen. You can pre order a Lady's boxy
tea which you guys seem to love, a unisext or
a hat now until November fourth at exactly right store
dot com. You guys love that design, so we'll bring
it back. All right, Karen, You're you're up, and you're
(07:41):
only up, and only.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm the only one up. You're sitting up with me,
So thank you for that, and thank you for everyone
else doing it too. I'm going to tell you, guys
a little story in honor of Halloween tomorrow. It takes
place in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in nineteen eighteen, and that
summer is remembered for two big things. One grace Guy's
(08:03):
in very little sunshine and two the birthday of a
very very famous monster. The real story of his creation
is fittingly Gothic. There's death, disaster, a lot of drama,
and a handful of bohemian literary heavyweights huddled in a room,
drunk and fawning all over each other while thunder and
lightning rages outside. And among those bohemians is our famous
(08:26):
monster's true creator and she is only a teenager. This
is the story of Mary Shelley and that gloomy summer
vacation when she created Frankenstein.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, So the main sources that Maren used in this
story today are works of several Mary Shelley biographers, including
Charlotte Gordon, Fiona Sampson, and Miranda Seymour. And the rest
of the sources are in our show notes so truly
to really set the scene, the story starts in eighteen
fifteen in Indonesia on the island of sum and that
(09:01):
is where the volcano Mount Tambora erupts in a deadly
series of blasts.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
There is a book I was just gonna tell you
that I'm obsessed with, called The Year Without Summer eighteen
sixteen and the Volcano that darkened the world and changed history,
and her story. She's in it. Mary Shelley, Like.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Yes, yes, this is it.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
So William Klingman and Nicholas Klingman it's so fucking good.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I'm about to retell you this story that you that you.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Know but nobody. I had never heard of it before,
and like people don't know me either, changed history and.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It's such a big, like the kickoff disaster event is
such a gigantic disaster.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
It's like beyond bleie, yeah, the volcano.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But the thing is that's cool too, is that nobody
knew why everything changed, that it was a volcano until
the future because they didn't have just like weatherman telling
you what was going on.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, that makes sense, mystery.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So they're just like it's rainy, it's just summertime, but
it's thunderstorms and crazy.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Not only that, it's like none of the crops are growing.
Why is this happening? No one knew? Okay, oh my god,
I'm so exciting. This is so widespread. Found very dorky
about loving this book and now I'm so excited to
hear this.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
No, it's so good. Okay, so then tell me and
jump in when you know stuff, please if there's like
details or whatever. So it's Mount Tambora erupting in a
series of deadly blasts. The final explosion happens on April tenth,
and it is particularly catastrophic. To put it into perspective,
it's considered the most destructive explosion in recorded history. It
(10:33):
is one hundred times more powerful than Mount Saint Helen's
eruption in nineteen hundred times one hundred times. And if
you want to know how powerful that eruption was, you
can go to episode three seventy necessary Yelling, and I
will tell you all about it.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So some reports say that the blast could be heard
more than two thousand miles away, So that would mean
if you're in Los Angeles, you can hear an explosion
in Atlanta, Georgia. It blows more than four thousand eat
off the mountaintop, and eye witnesses say that it looks
like Mount Tambora has been quote consumed by liquid fire,
a fountain of ash, water and molten rock shooting in
(11:09):
every direction. So this explosion creates fiery, hot, extremely powerful
gusts of wind that flatten homes, uproot trees, and toss
human beings around like rag dolls. Pummice stones the size
of grapefruits are falling from the sky.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Oh pre pummice stones.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Right, Just grab one for your heels and get indoors, please,
But it won't matter if you're indoors, because fifteen foot
tall Tsunamis hit land and destroy everything that is still standing.
Heavy ash falls from the skies, burying everything within twenty
miles of the volcano, and most lethally scorching one thousand
(11:47):
degree debris shoots down the side of Mount Tambora at
one hundred miles an hour in what look like fiery
avalanches that incinerate everything in their pasts, vegetation, homes, and
of course the people. It's estimated ten thousand people die
instantly in this explosion. But then, as you were saying,
in the months that follow the nearby village is reel
(12:10):
from destruction of crops and all the ash that's still
in the air and no clean water, and then the
death toll in Indonesia grows eventually to ninety thousand. According
to Scientific American quote, no other volcanic explosion in history
has come close to wreaking disaster of that magnitude, so
it's obviously humongous, and then has all these repercussions because
(12:33):
once that debris is in the atmosphere, it forms a
massive cloud of volcanic junk, and it envelops the entire
planet in two months, and that causes bizarre, unprecedented weather
systems all around the world. So some places see strange
sudden frosts, some see unending rain, others suffer horrible droughts.
(12:55):
And it all causes the following year, eighteen sixteen to
go down in history as quote the year without a summer.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So crazy. And if you look at paintings from that time,
landscape paintings, a sky is a different color in all
those paintings because the sky was literally different color for years.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
It's insane, like ashy, ashy, gray, reddish, weird, yeah, ashy,
oh yeah, like when it's sunset but there's been a
fire and it turns those crazy colors.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
We know that you're in la too.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Well.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah, but that's not the end of the devastation. The
eruption sends more than thirty five cubic miles of ash,
gas and debris into the skies. Wired magazine will say
it was enough to quote bury all the playing surface
of Fenway Park in Boston eighty one five hundred and
forty four miles deep in ash.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
What I can't even wrap my head around that.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I know it's because we're not based by people, but
it's basically like from here to that far into space
essentially is so much much. So much was in the
air as far away as the southern United States. No
fall is reported in both June and July, with one
Virginian note that quote. On July fourth, water foes and
cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving
(14:10):
inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite end quote.
Of course, that all makes for very bad harvests, meaning
food supplies around the world are much smaller than normal,
the prices for basics skyrocket, and that leads to a
widespread famine. A writer named Gillan Darcy Wood notes that
quote villagers in Vermont survived on groundhogs and boiled nettles, dear,
(14:36):
while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay.
Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads
for armies on the march.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So it's horrible, and it's horrible everywhere.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Hunger, cold temperatures, and social chaos is all around, making
it hard for the average person to fend off disease Europe.
Sy's a brutal outbreak of typhus that kills forty thousand people,
and the first deadly global cholera pandemic begins soon after
that in eighteen seventeen. There's not an exact global death
toll that we can attribute to the Mount Tempore eruption,
(15:11):
but writer Gillan Darcy Wood estimates that it's somewhere in
the tens of millions.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
That's because the cumulative issues that cause more and more death.
It reminds me of the Spanish flu of nineteen nineteen,
which I love reading about, where it's just this kind
of mystery of where it came from, but the devastation
it did is just so fascinating and widespread and like
it doesn't discriminate, Like everyone's fucked essentially.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Right, Okay, So it's a terrifying, disorienting time to be alive.
Death and desperation permeates everything all around. And this is
what's happening in the world. When we meet our hero
Mary Walston Craft Godwin in London, England. Mary is a
quietly intense redhead who comes from a famously radical family.
Her father is a well known writer and anarchist named
(16:00):
William Godwin, and he is also credited with publishing the
first English detective novel called Caleb Williams.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Oh, I had no idea, I.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Know, right, such a good title for a detective novel.
It am Caleb Williams. It's not sounds like a seventh
grader at a local junior high. And her mother is
Mary Walston Craft, who is a trailblazing feminist writer and
philosopher whose fierce devotions to women's rights inspire the men
of her time to dismiss her as quote a hyena
(16:30):
in petticoat. So she must have been good, Yeah, yeah, totally.
But the sad thing is Mary never knew her mother
because in seventeen ninety seven, days after giving birth to Mary,
Mary Walston Craft dies of infection because the doctors removed
her placenta with dirty, on washed hands. Guys, I mean,
(16:51):
it's so please, so horrifying. Mary carries the burden of
her mother's death from a very young age. She spends
a lot of time in the cemetery where her mother's buried.
It's said that Mary learns to write by tracing the
letters on her mother's headstone. And when she's a bit older,
she spends hours sitting on her mother's grave reading her
mother's feminist works.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Oh my god, heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
She's like a little Edward Gorey character, like playing in
the cemetery. So then her father remarries and sadly, her stepmother,
Mary Jane Claremont, is a jealous, controlling woman who openly
favors her own children, especially her daughter Claire. It's a tense,
crowded living situation. Mary feels completely cast aside, and she
(17:35):
spends even more time at the cemetery to escape from
her increasingly fraught home life. And then it gets worse.
As she grows into a teenager, Mary starts to look
exactly like her mother, which seems to be more than
her stepmother can handle. So under the guise of a
health treatment, Mary is sent off to Scotland to live
with family friends. So at the time, Scotland has a
(17:56):
huge arts and literary scene and there's tons of inspiring
revolutionary thinkers.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
So her stepmom kind of did her a favor by
kicking her out.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, getting her out of there, and suddenly it's like, ooh,
best case.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Scenario, Yeah, the world opens up.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, So one of Mary's biographers, Charlotte Gordon, describes it
as quote like going to San Francisco during hayd ASHBURYO.
And it's here, while in exile from her own home,
that Mary really starts developing her creative voice and her
interest in writing. So from time to time Mary travels
back to London to visit her beloved father, and it's
on one of these visits that she first meets a
(18:34):
poet named Percy bish Shelley. He's five years her senior.
He is now famous for his sonnet Ozzie Mandias, but
when they meet in the eighteen tens, he's not a
famous poet. He's actually an authority bucking young bohemian from
a filthy rich family who spends a lot of time
with Mary's father trying to learn about his philosophical takes
(18:56):
on anarchy. Percy also has some notoriety after being Dad
of Oxford for refusing to admit that he'd circulated a
pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Percy is also a
married father, though he's sometimes said to be estranged from
his wife, Harriet Shelley, it seems safe to say Percy
is not a particularly present husband to his wife, and
(19:18):
he has actually adopted a non monogamous ethos that Mary
will struggle with from here on out, as.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Will Harriet, of course.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
But all this is to say, when Percy and Mary
first meet sparks fly, she will bring him to her
mother's grave. That's where they'll first say I love you.
They end up running off together not long after, and
pretty soon after that, Mary gets pregnant. She is sixteen
at the time, shit uh huh, and Percy's twenty one,
(19:48):
so that's a huge scandal. So to escape the dirty
looks in the gossip, they leave England and they just
start traveling around Europe. Mary's stepsister, Claire, the one that
the stepmother favored. She dabbles in writing and speaks several languages,
so she joins them and acts as kind of a
local translator. And Mary is actually very close with her stepsister,
(20:11):
even though she doesn't like her mother. They're like a
year apart in age. So as the three move throughout
the continent, Percy encourages Mary to write, but she's so
exhausted from her pregnancy she feels constantly sick and weak.
Her lack of energy is only intensified by the fact
that they are constantly traveling, and then she tries to
start projects and then she can't finish them, and it's
(20:32):
all She's just all kind of exhausted all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So I sometimes travel and I'm not pregnant, and I
can't fucking imagine, I know.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Just like and not being able to take like vitamins
or something that you're just kind of like on a.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Train for for God.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So in February of eighteen fifteen, Mary goes into premature
labor and they lose the baby. She's overcome with grief,
and just one week after losing her child, she writes
in her diary quote dreamt that my little baby came
to life again, that it had been cold, and that
we rubbed it before the fire and it lived awake
and find no baby. I think about the little thing
(21:10):
all day, not in good spirits, so sad. But it
is a significant moment for more reasons than one. So
it's two months after this tragedy that Mount Tambora erupts,
and it is a fitting reflection of her grief. The
way the skies all darken and the sun never comes out.
Everything turned to unending gray before long, Mary's pregnant again,
(21:34):
and in January of eighteen sixteen, as that volcanic ashes
circles the earth, nineteen year old Mary gives birth to
a boy named William. So now it's May of eighteen
sixteen and it's the beginning of the so called volcanic Winter. Mary, Percy,
and the baby are cushioned from the worst of it.
When their funds dry up, they just get money from
(21:56):
Percy's father, who bails them out, so they always have food,
they always have shelter. But the world outside is very
bleak for a lot of people, and there's just a
sense of dread everywhere. So it's at this point that
Marian Percy decide that they're going to go to Geneva, Switzerland,
and Claire is the one who actually suggests this idea,
(22:18):
but she does have an agenda. Claire actually knows that
twenty eight year old poet Lord Byron is going to
be in Geneva, Switzerland.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
She's like, he's totally going to be there, and I've
got to meet him.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yes, well, no, she'd already been having a bit of
an affair with him.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
I've been Fuckingham and I've got to see him exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
She's kind of obsessed. She's been writing him witty, flirtatious
letters and basically propositioning him. He takes her up on
the offer, but then she kind of won't leave him alone,
and he's Lord Byron is infamous for being really awful
to his exes, so he's just like a love him
and leaving type of guy. He is also the Titan
of the Romantic movement, but unlike Percy Bishelley, Byron is
(22:58):
a massive celebrity of this. Charlotte Gordon likens him to
Mick Jagger at the height of his fame.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
So one of Lord Byron's most famous literary works, which
is called Child with an E at the end Child
Harold's Pilgrimage, It was published a few years earlier to
serious acclaim. But he's as famous for his private life.
He has a reputation for sleeping with anyone he thinks
is interesting, men or women, married or single, even his
(23:26):
own family members. He actually is rumored to have had
an affair with his own half sister.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Sounds like a vampire. Is he a vampire?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Right? Oh? Well, shit, that will come that will come up,
that will come up.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Classic vampire moves right there.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Classic just being like, there's no boundaries, I'm really open
and I love blood. So in eighteen sixteen, amid accusations
that he's engaging in quote sodomy and homosexuality, both illegal
in England at the time, he moves to Switzerland. So
the problem with Claire's plan is Lord Iron has made
(24:01):
it clear he is not into her and he doesn't
like her, but she can't help herself, so she basically
hopes if they go there, Mary and Percy will be
the ones that help rekindle the connection because Lord Byron
will be like obsessed with them because they're two young writers,
you know, doing it all. They're bohemian, they're creative, and
they're all out running scandals. So there's just a lot
(24:23):
of it's very juicy. So in May of eighteen sixteen,
the Shelleys arrive in Lake Geneva and they rent a
house there, just steps from Lord Byron's lakeside mansion, Villa
Dio Dotti. Even though it's supposed to be a summer vacation,
the weather's brutal. The fallout from Mount Tambora is hitting
your apart, especially in Switzerland. It rains nearly every single
(24:44):
day that summer. It floods Geneva with mud and rotting
crops from the soaking wet fields. On June first, Mary
writes a letter to a family member saying, quote and
almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house. One night,
we enjoyed a finer storm that I had never before beheld.
The lake was lit up, the pines made visible, and
(25:04):
all the scene illuminated for an instant when a pitchy
blackness succeeded and the thunder came in frightful bursts over
our heads amid the blackness.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow, moody, so moody.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Right, they're like stuck in the beginning of the movie Franken'stime,
and it's just like constantly that thing. It was a
dark and stormy night. So one afternoon, amid all this
intense gloomy weather, the Shelley household finally crosses paths with
Lord Byron, and Claire was right. He hits it off
with Percy and Mary immediately, and he invites them back
to his villa, so they meet his fleet of dogs,
(25:39):
monkeys and even a falcon, and his twenty year old
traveling companion John Polodori. He serves as Byron's personal physician.
Paulodori also has literary ambitions, and he's being paid by
Byron's publisher to keep journals on their travels together, and
then they plan to publish them as a book of
(26:00):
Byron and Shelley Camps. Linking up makes it all the
way back to England, where they're talked about as like
a scandalized supergroup. Newspapers refer to them as quote League
of Incest. A gaggle of British guests at a nearby
Geneva hotel set up a telescope aimed right at the villa,
but the thick fog makes it impossible for them to
(26:21):
be able to look inside, but they're trying.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
To look inside.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
If they could see inside, what they'd see is everyone
drinking tons of wine and laudnum, which is diluted liquid opium,
and then either sleeping with each other or getting into
fights with each other, or some combination of the two.
So even though Lord Byron openly despises Claire, by the
end of the summer, he's still sleeping with her, and
so she gets pregnant.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I think this is Love Island, Ukay.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's almost like better, It's like Haunted Frankenstein, Love's watch It.
There are some historians who've speculated, but nothing's been proven
that actually this child is Percy Bisch Shelley's child, because
he and Claire are suspected of having an affair, and
depending on which source you're reading, it's also been said
that Pauladori is infatuated with either Lord Byron or Mary
(27:13):
Drama aside, it's impossible for these people to enjoy the outdoors,
so they basically spend every night by a fire at
the villa, reading spooky poems and stories while thunder and
lightning rattle the mansion. They're reading from a book named Phantasmagoriana,
which is a collection of German horror stories recently translated
(27:33):
into French. It has a bit of everything, ghosts, malevolent spirits,
family curses, haunted places, stuff like that. And they are
all drunk and high, so these stories hit pretty hard.
One night, as Lord Byron is reading, Percy jumps out
of his chair and bolts out of the room, and
he later says quote he'd seen a terrifying vision of Mary,
(27:55):
who'd been in the corner nursing their child with staring
eyes instead of nipple on her breast.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Dude, take a nap, freaking out, take a nap freaks
of orangelicense me down.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Stop with the opium for one second.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I nipples. That's fucking a new one from hate Ashbury.
I don't think.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
No, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So after a while, Lord Byron switches things up and
tasks the group with writing their own horror stories. It's
a contest, and whoever creates the most chilling visceral work wins.
So by day they all go to their respective rooms
and pull out their ink pens and they write. And
at night they come back together and they share their
works and progress and they give each other feedback.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I love this. I want to do this with my friends,
but without so many drugs and alcohol, but without not
as many. I don't want to see eyeballs.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Let's not make a rule right now, Let's just like
see what happens.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Let's not let's not can go however, we.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Don't want to go into eyeball territory. But yeah, you're right. Well,
here's what I think is kind of cool. And I'm
giving the credit to Lord Byron, which is everyone's fighting
and fucking and.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Doing all this crazy shit.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
It's like, how about everyone gets creative and puts their
work on the paper and just puts their energy that way,
and then look what comes out of it. It's wild
what comes out of it. So it doesn't seem like Percy,
Bishelley or Claire contribute much to this little writing group
if anything. Instead they're working on their own projects that
have nothing to do with the horror genre. Lord Byron meanwhile,
(29:23):
takes inspiration from stories he's heard while traveling in Eastern
Europe of vampires. But those ones are a little different
than our modern vampire. Per the folklore that he heard,
they were grotesque, undead corpses that would rise out of
their graves at night like zombies and suck the blood
of the living. Different kind of monster, sure, different flavor,
(29:44):
more of a Roquefort situation with those ones. So he
starts a story that he never ends up finishing, but
in it he takes the concept of a vampire and
makes a little sexier. His vampire is a socially intelligent
British aristocrat who also has a thirst for blood, but
he is able to blend in with the upper class,
and he's a.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Romantic, imagine that, who are we talking about? And he's
so hot, he's so sexy.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So hot.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
But essentially, this version of the vampire is actually the
one that sticks in our culture, from Dracula to Twilight.
So that does come from Lord Byron's original idea.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
So when the.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Rest of the group here's this, they tell Lord Byron
he's onto something, but he doesn't listen and he scraps
the story. Basically, he doesn't enjoy writing horror or gothic horror.
But John Paula Dory takes it and he makes it
his own, and he eventually releases a novella called The
Vampire p yr And that is said to be the
first English language vampire story ever published.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Was Byron pissed that he fucking copied him?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
He doesn't seem like the tire.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
He seems like he's like, you've have mild idea whatever,
and he's got like a kerchief in his hand at
all times. But obviously, the inarguable winner of this writing
contest is nineteen year old Mary Shelley, whose entry starts
as a short story. It's so compelling that the others
urge her to expand it into a novel, and it
eventually becomes Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Which is the full title. I never knew that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
The condensed refresher that no one needs but it will
be fun to do.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Is that.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Frankenstein's about a young scientist who makes the very risky
decision to play god, designing a creature that looks somewhat
human and using it electricity to jolt into life. Frankenstein's
creature is born with a kind heart, but he's very
lonely and he longs for connection, and he's beaten down
by people's fear as well as their cruelty toward him,
and he's abandoned by his own creator. All the poor
(31:42):
treatment hardens the creature until he becomes a monster, just
as Frankenstein's abandonment of the creature turns the scientist into
a monster. And if you watch Young Frankenstein, that's exactly
what happens.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There's a Frankenstein bar that we went to in Edinburgh
that was fucking incredible Scotland.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Ooh, did like did a thing go up?
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Every hour? Whatever the monster would come out that like
music would go down and like the crazy ass creepy
shit would happen there's like all these lights. It's a
fucking rat bar.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yes, that sounds so good, Okay.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So as this group leaves like Geneva at the end
of the summer, Mary does keep working on the story
when she gets back to England, but her writing is
sidelined once again by even more tragedy. And I have
to tell you, there's so many more things I'm going
to tell you that are sad that happen in her life.
It's like kind of devastating how much bad shed happens
to this woman. So her half sister Fanny, who is
(32:36):
a daughter of her mother's from a different relationship, takes
her own life, and then weeks after that, Percy's estranged wife, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Also dies by suicide.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
So as horrible as all of that is, it does
allow Percy and Mary to finally get married, which they weren't.
They had kids together and stuff with the bay weren't married.
So they finally get married, but Mary is consumed with
guilt over Harriet's death. Year in eighteen seventeen, she finishes Frankenstein.
It's published in January of eighteen eighteen, on New Year's Day,
when she's twenty years old. It's released anonymously, so her
(33:10):
name is not on the book in the beginning, and
it's a small publisher, not particularly well known. There's only
about five hundred copies that they put out on very
cheap paper and with no fanfare. But people still end
up buying it, and then the people who buy it
and read it talk about it, and so the word
spreads that because it's just that good, and some critics
(33:31):
love it, some find it distasteful, but it captivates the
public's interest and nothing like it has ever existed before.
Frankenstein is as romantic and philosophical as it is horrifying,
and it's often called the first science fiction novel, and
it just keeps growing in popularity, even getting adapted into
incredibly popular stage plays. And because the book includes a
(33:53):
dedication to Mary's father, William Godwin and a preface that's
written by Percy, rumors swirl that one of these men
are the ones that actually wrote this book. Mary meanwhile,
stays in the shadows. She doesn't make much off of
the popularity of her book. It's not clear how much
she actually earns from it. We do know that the
bulk of the money goes to the publisher and of
(34:16):
course there's no copyright protections at the time, so the
theatrical productions that use her story don't pay her for it.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And then in eighteen eighteen, a year after Frankenstein's published,
Mary loses another daughter. One year old Clara dies in
Mary's arms after contracting dysentery. The year after that, Mary's
son William dies of malaria. So these losses compound Mary's
existing grief. She goes into a deep depression, with Percy
(34:44):
writing around this time, quote my dearest Mary, wherefore hast
thou gone and left me in this dreary world alone?
That's a Percy Bis Shelley line.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
So sad.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
But the same year Mary will give birth again, this
time to a son named Percy, and he will be
the one child that they have that lives to adulthood.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Tragedy seems to follow the whole Villa crew from Lake Geneva.
In eighteen twenty one, John Pauladori, the author of The
Vampire and Lord Byron's one time physician, takes his own life.
He's only twenty five years old. It's been speculated he
was suffering from depression and felt buried under the weight
of his gambling debts. Then the Shelleys continue to cross
(35:25):
paths with Lord Byron, though he does refuse to see Claire.
Mary stepsister Claire, and he treats her with hostility even
though they have a child together. They have a daughter
that Claire named Alba. Lord Byron takes custody of the baby,
renames her Alegra, and then cuts Claire off from ever
seeing her. It's just like a horrible thing. He takes
(35:46):
custody of the baby, but then puts her in foster
like rotating foster homes, and then in a convent. And
when Allegra is five years old, she dies from typhus
at the convent, and then Lord Byron dies two years
later of a fever. So Claire herself lives to be
eighty and of course mourns her daughter for the rest
of her life. Then, in eighteen twenty two, three years
(36:09):
after their son Percy is born, twenty nine year old
Percy Bishelly drowns in Italy when his sailboat gets caught
in a storm. So Mary's widowed. She's twenty five years old, Jesus,
and she will live another three decades. She dies when
she's fifty three of a suspected brain tumor, but she
never remarries. The year after Percy's death is when Mary
(36:30):
finally reveals that she is the author of Frankenstein. She
basically needs money and they're reissuing the novel so she
can get some cash. She only receives a small allowance
from Percy's family as a widow, and she mostly supports
herself and her young son by writing and taking on
editing work. But the reveal that Mary is the one
who wrote Frankenstein is literally unbelievable to some people. Akamen.
(36:56):
Critics immediately try to give the credit to her late husband,
thinking there's no way a woman could have written something
so dark and layered. But Frankenstein is so unmistakably hers.
It is about grief, alienation, and guilt, things Mary has
felt since childhood, and she even lifts passages from her
own personal journal, particularly dispatches about the wet, stormy weather
(37:17):
in Lake Geneva during the year without a Summer. Even
the premise itself of generating life from something not living
echoes the dream Mary had after her first daughter died.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
I dreamt that my little baby came to life. Again,
that it had been cold, and that we rubbed it
before the fire and it lived right. Both Mary and
Frankenstein's monster yearn for the type of unconditional love, a
motherly love that they've never had. Frankenstein has been interpreted
by many modern scholars as a feminist text, and one
that's clearly shaped by Mary's grief and longing for her
(37:51):
own mother.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
I know, right, it's so sad.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
As biographer Charlotte Gordon puts it, quote, Frankenstein is actually
a book about women. I would say it's a dystopian
novel about a world without mothers and a world without
strong women. Unchecked male ambition, says Mary Shelley is going
to wreak havoc on the world. And that's the story
behind one of the greatest works of Gothic fiction, Mary
Shelley's Franken.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Still Wow, what a fascinating story that I didn't know.
I didn't know, right, Oh my god. Good that's incredible,
so good, So great job, good job for Halloween especially.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Thank you, and great job marrying Muglashan once again, just
killing it.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
It's so good.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
That was incredible, great.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Job, Thank you, well, Happy Halloween, Thank.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
You, Happy Halloween. What are you going to be for
Halloween this year?
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Home?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I think this year I'm going to be a person
who's at home. I told someone what I was going
to be the other day, and now I can't remember
what it was. What a great joke that I can't remember?
What are you going to be for Halloween? To me?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
In a cute Halloween dress with maybe cat ears on
passing out candy to all the kids in our neighborhood.
It's my favorite.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Nice. Oh yeah, you have to go on full on candy.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, that's the best.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Well, enjoy thank you.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Last year we counted on a clicker and there was
nine hundred ninety eight kids before we had We ran
out of candy and had to turn the lights off.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
I know it could have kept going. Yeah, it's fucking weiry.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
It's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Well, I hope everybody that's listening is going to trick
or treat their asses off and really enjoy themselves.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
That's right, have so much fun. Be safe and watch
out for spooky spooky, watch out for volcanoes.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah, watch out for teenagers trying to egg your house,
it's real.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Goodbye, Elvis, Do you want a cookie?
Speaker 4 (39:49):
We come to this legal system for justice, but.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
We don't always get it. I'm Melissa Malbranch.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
And I'm Michael Foot. You might know me as everyone's
favorite lawyer from TikTok. I'm sick of the this whole.
Like my life is separate from my job, it ain't.
I'm a fear Steven the courtroom as well as at home.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
Every week on our podcast, Brief Recess, we take the
legal world out of the courtroom and into real life,
like can your boss actually fire you for what you
post online?
Speaker 4 (40:13):
What happens if ice knocks on your door?
Speaker 5 (40:15):
Oh? What should you do if you get arrested at
a protest?
Speaker 4 (40:17):
We break down insane headlines, answer real questions from listeners,
and share wild stories about what really happens in court.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Friends.
Speaker 5 (40:25):
Please remember, while Michael is a lawyer, he is not.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Your lawyer unless you want to hire me. I mean
that's a difference.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
I am everyone has the price, and I'm actually prittent
ship from.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
The Exactly Right Network.
Speaker 5 (40:36):
Brief Recess premieres on November thirteenth, with new episodes thursdays.
Watch Brief Recess on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
Listen to Brief Recess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
This has been an Exactly Right production.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Our editor is Aristotle Osceiveta.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Our researchers are Maaron McGlashan and Ali Elkin.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
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Speaker 2 (41:10):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And now you can watch us on exactly Right's YouTube page.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
While you're there, please like and subscribe.
Speaker 4 (41:20):
Good byebye
Well, we're so excited to be sharing the trailer for
our brand new show, Brief Recess, a legal podcast with
Michael Foot and Melissa Mautbranch.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You may know Michael as the immigration lawyer from TikTok
who gives an insider's perspective on the legal system, usually
with way more humor than it deserves. And Melissa has
spent her career as a nonprofit leader, a writer, and
most importantly, Michael's best friend.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
And together they discuss real life legal issues that affect
us all. It's smart, hilarious, and it makes the law
accessible in a time when we all need to know
what's going on.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So stick around after this episode of My Favorite Murder
to hear the trailer for Brief Recess, premiering Thursday, November thirteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
And you can follow Brief Recess now on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Goodbye, last hello, and welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's
(01:04):
Georgia hart Stark.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
That's Karen Kilgareff, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
For a moment from the road.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
We are in the midst of our tour. Let's see
when this goes up we'll only have two cities left.
Can you believe that? Just on la which is insane.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, it feels like it was just a gleam in
our eye and now it's almost over.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
What's your favorite moment? I know what your favorite gift
is from the road you do? Yeah, we haven't talked
about this yet for some reason.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Favorite moment.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I did enjoy kicking that stuffed animal back out into
the audience after they threw it at us.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
That's right, someone threw up like a big plushy and
it rolled on to the stage like a grenade.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
It was very scary.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It was a very surreal, quiet moment that we just
stared at it and we didn't know what to do,
and then Karen just took two steps and punted it
back into the audience.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I mean, one of my proudest moments. What about yours?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Well, I was going to say to you. Do you
remember when someone in the me and greet very early
on was a dentist and brought you the little scrub
oh tooth brush toothpaste thing from think after you get
your teeth clean.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It was the most meaningful gift, Like what you know,
the real gift is people actually hearing you when you
say things right. He came up and he's like, I'm
a dentist, so I brought you the gift that only
I can give you or whatever. You know.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
His little speech was, yeah, that you asked for an
episode like two hundred something.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, where the story of me asking my own childhood
dentist that when I was like ten years old. And
he just started laughing. He's like, what are you talking about? Yeah,
and then he was like, I'm a dentist and I
got it for you.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
He gave you a baggie like full of dental scrubs of.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
This scrubbiest tooth polish that I can't really use it home.
I don't have a polisher, but oh, I'm so glad
you reminded me of that.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
That was so incredible.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
That was really good.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone for coming to the show
so far. They've been just absolutely incredible. To come back.
I just having not done that in six years, I
forgot what it was like to walk on stage with
people screaming at you, and it is just like unlike
any feeling you'll ever have. I'm assuming like giving birth
is like that. I don't know, I'll never know.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I think it's a lot louder than giving birth, although
who am I to say?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A lot more fun so good, So like I do.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Think it's that electricity that you can only get in
that situation. It's easy to go like, oh yeah, I
remember and whatever, but it's like, once you're doing it,
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
I find it addictive. I love it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, I'm worried I'll be like chasing that high for
the rest of my life once yeah, this twenty years
when this all ends, All right, what do you got?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Well, let's see. Oh, can I read you this email
that's from a listener from a story I told about
pulling up behind somebody that actually had an SSDGM bumper sticker.
So I got to see it in real life. And yeah,
it was the first time. Well, someone wrote in and
this subject line is Karen hanked at me, and it says,
let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It was a weird day.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
I was brushing home from work because I got a
call that my wife was in a bike accident. And
then it says she's okay, banged up in ruse, but okay.
I was just focused on getting to her at the
urgent care off pass avenue. I exited the one thirty
four pass, Oh my god, and was letting my mind
go to dark places.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
One Hong Kong. H that was weird. Who's honking?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I look in my rear view mirror and the woman
behind me is waving. Okay, weird. The light turns green
and I'm making my left turn and Hong Kong Kong.
Now said woman has her window rolled down and she's
waving emphatically. She's smiling, so she must not be pissed
at me for something I've done. In my confusion, I
waved back because it's the polite thing to do.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh my god, this person having an actual emergency, and
you were like you were concerned as to why they
weren't paying attention to you, but they were literally having
an emergency.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I demand that you talk to me about my podcast,
no matter what's happening in your family. Okay, it says.
I turned left into the parking lot and she kept going.
I figured I'd never know what the hell that was about.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Him, didn't even know it was you.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Oh my god, No, that's this is hilarious.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So cut to a few weeks later, and I get
a frantic text from my friend Anne, and then it
says quotes was this you? And then she sent me
an Instagram post where Karen describes her version of this encounter.
I wish I'd realized it was Karen, even though I
was in the middle of a weird, damn life sucks
sometimes moment. It would have lifted my spirits, even for
just a passing moment. Oh that's nice, Karen, if you
(05:19):
see me again, a new honk. I promised to be
as joyful and excited as you looked last time.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh, oh my god, I can't believe we get on
the other side of this story.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Hilarious. And then it says my friend Amber and I
will see you ladies in Pasadena. Can't wait.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Will be the ones waving in the middle section XO
xo kat See. We gotta wave with them, We gotta
say hi to them. That is yeah, the sweet I mean,
what a horrible and yet thank god it wasn't you
know it turned out okay?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, man, But just to have that happen while you're
having a panic attack, essentially, oh.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
My god, it's a real act out of you never
know what other people are going through, and it's like.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Hong Hong Kong Hey, Hong Kong conger you alright, Hong Kong.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
All right, should we do some highlights?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, we have a podcast network called what's it called
exactly right Media. That's right, I'm so tired. Here are
some highlights.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Okay, So tomorrow Buried Bones, we'll have a very special
bonus episode from the High Seas. Live from the Virgin
Voyages Crime Cruise, Paul and Kate take on one of
their most requested cases ever, the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Whoa.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
You can watch the full episode on the exactly right
YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash exactly right Media, or
you can listen to the audio wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Wow, what a show. Speaking of YouTube, a brand new
Halloween episode of MFM Animated premiered yesterday. Head over to
the exactly right YouTube channel again, YouTube dot com, slash
exactly right Media to watch child Devil out.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Now we got to see Nick Terry in Seattle.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Here's the greatest is and Episode five of our newest
series Hell in Heaven, producer with Blanchard House and iHeart Podcasts,
is out today. It is a hit podcast. It's so exciting.
This thing shot up the charts and you should listen.
One gunshot, one body, and a mystery that only gets
stranger from there. It's Helen Heaven.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And in honor of this week's episode of rewind, we're
re releasing our classic Triflers need Not Applied merch design
from twenty seventeen. You can pre order a Lady's boxy
tea which you guys seem to love, a unisext or
a hat now until November fourth at exactly right store
dot com. You guys love that design, so we'll bring
it back. All right, Karen, You're you're up, and you're
(07:41):
only up, and only.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm the only one up. You're sitting up with me,
So thank you for that, and thank you for everyone
else doing it too. I'm going to tell you, guys
a little story in honor of Halloween tomorrow. It takes
place in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in nineteen eighteen, and that
summer is remembered for two big things. One grace Guy's
(08:03):
in very little sunshine and two the birthday of a
very very famous monster. The real story of his creation
is fittingly Gothic. There's death, disaster, a lot of drama,
and a handful of bohemian literary heavyweights huddled in a room,
drunk and fawning all over each other while thunder and
lightning rages outside. And among those bohemians is our famous
(08:26):
monster's true creator and she is only a teenager. This
is the story of Mary Shelley and that gloomy summer
vacation when she created Frankenstein.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, So the main sources that Maren used in this
story today are works of several Mary Shelley biographers, including
Charlotte Gordon, Fiona Sampson, and Miranda Seymour. And the rest
of the sources are in our show notes so truly
to really set the scene, the story starts in eighteen
fifteen in Indonesia on the island of sum and that
(09:01):
is where the volcano Mount Tambora erupts in a deadly
series of blasts.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
There is a book I was just gonna tell you
that I'm obsessed with, called The Year Without Summer eighteen
sixteen and the Volcano that darkened the world and changed history,
and her story. She's in it. Mary Shelley, Like.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Yes, yes, this is it.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
So William Klingman and Nicholas Klingman it's so fucking good.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I'm about to retell you this story that you that you.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Know but nobody. I had never heard of it before,
and like people don't know me either, changed history and.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It's such a big, like the kickoff disaster event is
such a gigantic disaster.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
It's like beyond bleie, yeah, the volcano.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But the thing is that's cool too, is that nobody
knew why everything changed, that it was a volcano until
the future because they didn't have just like weatherman telling
you what was going on.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, that makes sense, mystery.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So they're just like it's rainy, it's just summertime, but
it's thunderstorms and crazy.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Not only that, it's like none of the crops are growing.
Why is this happening? No one knew? Okay, oh my god,
I'm so exciting. This is so widespread. Found very dorky
about loving this book and now I'm so excited to
hear this.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
No, it's so good. Okay, so then tell me and
jump in when you know stuff, please if there's like
details or whatever. So it's Mount Tambora erupting in a
series of deadly blasts. The final explosion happens on April tenth,
and it is particularly catastrophic. To put it into perspective,
it's considered the most destructive explosion in recorded history. It
(10:33):
is one hundred times more powerful than Mount Saint Helen's
eruption in nineteen hundred times one hundred times. And if
you want to know how powerful that eruption was, you
can go to episode three seventy necessary Yelling, and I
will tell you all about it.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So some reports say that the blast could be heard
more than two thousand miles away, So that would mean
if you're in Los Angeles, you can hear an explosion
in Atlanta, Georgia. It blows more than four thousand eat
off the mountaintop, and eye witnesses say that it looks
like Mount Tambora has been quote consumed by liquid fire,
a fountain of ash, water and molten rock shooting in
(11:09):
every direction. So this explosion creates fiery, hot, extremely powerful
gusts of wind that flatten homes, uproot trees, and toss
human beings around like rag dolls. Pummice stones the size
of grapefruits are falling from the sky.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Oh pre pummice stones.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Right, Just grab one for your heels and get indoors, please,
But it won't matter if you're indoors, because fifteen foot
tall Tsunamis hit land and destroy everything that is still standing.
Heavy ash falls from the skies, burying everything within twenty
miles of the volcano, and most lethally scorching one thousand
(11:47):
degree debris shoots down the side of Mount Tambora at
one hundred miles an hour in what look like fiery
avalanches that incinerate everything in their pasts, vegetation, homes, and
of course the people. It's estimated ten thousand people die
instantly in this explosion. But then, as you were saying,
in the months that follow the nearby village is reel
(12:10):
from destruction of crops and all the ash that's still
in the air and no clean water, and then the
death toll in Indonesia grows eventually to ninety thousand. According
to Scientific American quote, no other volcanic explosion in history
has come close to wreaking disaster of that magnitude, so
it's obviously humongous, and then has all these repercussions because
(12:33):
once that debris is in the atmosphere, it forms a
massive cloud of volcanic junk, and it envelops the entire
planet in two months, and that causes bizarre, unprecedented weather
systems all around the world. So some places see strange
sudden frosts, some see unending rain, others suffer horrible droughts.
(12:55):
And it all causes the following year, eighteen sixteen to
go down in history as quote the year without a summer.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So crazy. And if you look at paintings from that time,
landscape paintings, a sky is a different color in all
those paintings because the sky was literally different color for years.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
It's insane, like ashy, ashy, gray, reddish, weird, yeah, ashy,
oh yeah, like when it's sunset but there's been a
fire and it turns those crazy colors.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
We know that you're in la too.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Well.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah, but that's not the end of the devastation. The
eruption sends more than thirty five cubic miles of ash,
gas and debris into the skies. Wired magazine will say
it was enough to quote bury all the playing surface
of Fenway Park in Boston eighty one five hundred and
forty four miles deep in ash.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
What I can't even wrap my head around that.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I know it's because we're not based by people, but
it's basically like from here to that far into space
essentially is so much much. So much was in the
air as far away as the southern United States. No
fall is reported in both June and July, with one
Virginian note that quote. On July fourth, water foes and
cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving
(14:10):
inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite end quote.
Of course, that all makes for very bad harvests, meaning
food supplies around the world are much smaller than normal,
the prices for basics skyrocket, and that leads to a
widespread famine. A writer named Gillan Darcy Wood notes that
quote villagers in Vermont survived on groundhogs and boiled nettles, dear,
(14:36):
while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay.
Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads
for armies on the march.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So it's horrible, and it's horrible everywhere.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Hunger, cold temperatures, and social chaos is all around, making
it hard for the average person to fend off disease Europe.
Sy's a brutal outbreak of typhus that kills forty thousand people,
and the first deadly global cholera pandemic begins soon after
that in eighteen seventeen. There's not an exact global death
toll that we can attribute to the Mount Tempore eruption,
(15:11):
but writer Gillan Darcy Wood estimates that it's somewhere in
the tens of millions.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
That's because the cumulative issues that cause more and more death.
It reminds me of the Spanish flu of nineteen nineteen,
which I love reading about, where it's just this kind
of mystery of where it came from, but the devastation
it did is just so fascinating and widespread and like
it doesn't discriminate, Like everyone's fucked essentially.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Right, Okay, So it's a terrifying, disorienting time to be alive.
Death and desperation permeates everything all around. And this is
what's happening in the world. When we meet our hero
Mary Walston Craft Godwin in London, England. Mary is a
quietly intense redhead who comes from a famously radical family.
Her father is a well known writer and anarchist named
(16:00):
William Godwin, and he is also credited with publishing the
first English detective novel called Caleb Williams.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Oh, I had no idea, I.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Know, right, such a good title for a detective novel.
It am Caleb Williams. It's not sounds like a seventh
grader at a local junior high. And her mother is
Mary Walston Craft, who is a trailblazing feminist writer and
philosopher whose fierce devotions to women's rights inspire the men
of her time to dismiss her as quote a hyena
(16:30):
in petticoat. So she must have been good, Yeah, yeah, totally.
But the sad thing is Mary never knew her mother
because in seventeen ninety seven, days after giving birth to Mary,
Mary Walston Craft dies of infection because the doctors removed
her placenta with dirty, on washed hands. Guys, I mean,
(16:51):
it's so please, so horrifying. Mary carries the burden of
her mother's death from a very young age. She spends
a lot of time in the cemetery where her mother's buried.
It's said that Mary learns to write by tracing the
letters on her mother's headstone. And when she's a bit older,
she spends hours sitting on her mother's grave reading her
mother's feminist works.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Oh my god, heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
She's like a little Edward Gorey character, like playing in
the cemetery. So then her father remarries and sadly, her stepmother,
Mary Jane Claremont, is a jealous, controlling woman who openly
favors her own children, especially her daughter Claire. It's a tense,
crowded living situation. Mary feels completely cast aside, and she
(17:35):
spends even more time at the cemetery to escape from
her increasingly fraught home life. And then it gets worse.
As she grows into a teenager, Mary starts to look
exactly like her mother, which seems to be more than
her stepmother can handle. So under the guise of a
health treatment, Mary is sent off to Scotland to live
with family friends. So at the time, Scotland has a
(17:56):
huge arts and literary scene and there's tons of inspiring
revolutionary thinkers.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
So her stepmom kind of did her a favor by
kicking her out.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, getting her out of there, and suddenly it's like, ooh,
best case.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Scenario, Yeah, the world opens up.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, So one of Mary's biographers, Charlotte Gordon, describes it
as quote like going to San Francisco during hayd ASHBURYO.
And it's here, while in exile from her own home,
that Mary really starts developing her creative voice and her
interest in writing. So from time to time Mary travels
back to London to visit her beloved father, and it's
on one of these visits that she first meets a
(18:34):
poet named Percy bish Shelley. He's five years her senior.
He is now famous for his sonnet Ozzie Mandias, but
when they meet in the eighteen tens, he's not a
famous poet. He's actually an authority bucking young bohemian from
a filthy rich family who spends a lot of time
with Mary's father trying to learn about his philosophical takes
(18:56):
on anarchy. Percy also has some notoriety after being Dad
of Oxford for refusing to admit that he'd circulated a
pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Percy is also a
married father, though he's sometimes said to be estranged from
his wife, Harriet Shelley, it seems safe to say Percy
is not a particularly present husband to his wife, and
(19:18):
he has actually adopted a non monogamous ethos that Mary
will struggle with from here on out, as.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Will Harriet, of course.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
But all this is to say, when Percy and Mary
first meet sparks fly, she will bring him to her
mother's grave. That's where they'll first say I love you.
They end up running off together not long after, and
pretty soon after that, Mary gets pregnant. She is sixteen
at the time, shit uh huh, and Percy's twenty one,
(19:48):
so that's a huge scandal. So to escape the dirty
looks in the gossip, they leave England and they just
start traveling around Europe. Mary's stepsister, Claire, the one that
the stepmother favored. She dabbles in writing and speaks several languages,
so she joins them and acts as kind of a
local translator. And Mary is actually very close with her stepsister,
(20:11):
even though she doesn't like her mother. They're like a
year apart in age. So as the three move throughout
the continent, Percy encourages Mary to write, but she's so
exhausted from her pregnancy she feels constantly sick and weak.
Her lack of energy is only intensified by the fact
that they are constantly traveling, and then she tries to
start projects and then she can't finish them, and it's
(20:32):
all She's just all kind of exhausted all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
So I sometimes travel and I'm not pregnant, and I
can't fucking imagine, I know.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Just like and not being able to take like vitamins
or something that you're just kind of like on a.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Train for for God.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So in February of eighteen fifteen, Mary goes into premature
labor and they lose the baby. She's overcome with grief,
and just one week after losing her child, she writes
in her diary quote dreamt that my little baby came
to life again, that it had been cold, and that
we rubbed it before the fire and it lived awake
and find no baby. I think about the little thing
(21:10):
all day, not in good spirits, so sad. But it
is a significant moment for more reasons than one. So
it's two months after this tragedy that Mount Tambora erupts,
and it is a fitting reflection of her grief. The
way the skies all darken and the sun never comes out.
Everything turned to unending gray before long, Mary's pregnant again,
(21:34):
and in January of eighteen sixteen, as that volcanic ashes
circles the earth, nineteen year old Mary gives birth to
a boy named William. So now it's May of eighteen
sixteen and it's the beginning of the so called volcanic Winter. Mary, Percy,
and the baby are cushioned from the worst of it.
When their funds dry up, they just get money from
(21:56):
Percy's father, who bails them out, so they always have food,
they always have shelter. But the world outside is very
bleak for a lot of people, and there's just a
sense of dread everywhere. So it's at this point that
Marian Percy decide that they're going to go to Geneva, Switzerland,
and Claire is the one who actually suggests this idea,
(22:18):
but she does have an agenda. Claire actually knows that
twenty eight year old poet Lord Byron is going to
be in Geneva, Switzerland.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
She's like, he's totally going to be there, and I've
got to meet him.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yes, well, no, she'd already been having a bit of
an affair with him.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
I've been Fuckingham and I've got to see him exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
She's kind of obsessed. She's been writing him witty, flirtatious
letters and basically propositioning him. He takes her up on
the offer, but then she kind of won't leave him alone,
and he's Lord Byron is infamous for being really awful
to his exes, so he's just like a love him
and leaving type of guy. He is also the Titan
of the Romantic movement, but unlike Percy Bishelley, Byron is
(22:58):
a massive celebrity of this. Charlotte Gordon likens him to
Mick Jagger at the height of his fame.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
So one of Lord Byron's most famous literary works, which
is called Child with an E at the end Child
Harold's Pilgrimage, It was published a few years earlier to
serious acclaim. But he's as famous for his private life.
He has a reputation for sleeping with anyone he thinks
is interesting, men or women, married or single, even his
(23:26):
own family members. He actually is rumored to have had
an affair with his own half sister.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Sounds like a vampire. Is he a vampire?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Right? Oh? Well, shit, that will come that will come up,
that will come up.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Classic vampire moves right there.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Classic just being like, there's no boundaries, I'm really open
and I love blood. So in eighteen sixteen, amid accusations
that he's engaging in quote sodomy and homosexuality, both illegal
in England at the time, he moves to Switzerland. So
the problem with Claire's plan is Lord Iron has made
(24:01):
it clear he is not into her and he doesn't
like her, but she can't help herself, so she basically
hopes if they go there, Mary and Percy will be
the ones that help rekindle the connection because Lord Byron
will be like obsessed with them because they're two young writers,
you know, doing it all. They're bohemian, they're creative, and
they're all out running scandals. So there's just a lot
(24:23):
of it's very juicy. So in May of eighteen sixteen,
the Shelleys arrive in Lake Geneva and they rent a
house there, just steps from Lord Byron's lakeside mansion, Villa
Dio Dotti. Even though it's supposed to be a summer vacation,
the weather's brutal. The fallout from Mount Tambora is hitting
your apart, especially in Switzerland. It rains nearly every single
(24:44):
day that summer. It floods Geneva with mud and rotting
crops from the soaking wet fields. On June first, Mary
writes a letter to a family member saying, quote and
almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house. One night,
we enjoyed a finer storm that I had never before beheld.
The lake was lit up, the pines made visible, and
(25:04):
all the scene illuminated for an instant when a pitchy
blackness succeeded and the thunder came in frightful bursts over
our heads amid the blackness.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow, moody, so moody.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Right, they're like stuck in the beginning of the movie Franken'stime,
and it's just like constantly that thing. It was a
dark and stormy night. So one afternoon, amid all this
intense gloomy weather, the Shelley household finally crosses paths with
Lord Byron, and Claire was right. He hits it off
with Percy and Mary immediately, and he invites them back
to his villa, so they meet his fleet of dogs,
(25:39):
monkeys and even a falcon, and his twenty year old
traveling companion John Polodori. He serves as Byron's personal physician.
Paulodori also has literary ambitions, and he's being paid by
Byron's publisher to keep journals on their travels together, and
then they plan to publish them as a book of
(26:00):
Byron and Shelley Camps. Linking up makes it all the
way back to England, where they're talked about as like
a scandalized supergroup. Newspapers refer to them as quote League
of Incest. A gaggle of British guests at a nearby
Geneva hotel set up a telescope aimed right at the villa,
but the thick fog makes it impossible for them to
(26:21):
be able to look inside, but they're trying.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
To look inside.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
If they could see inside, what they'd see is everyone
drinking tons of wine and laudnum, which is diluted liquid opium,
and then either sleeping with each other or getting into
fights with each other, or some combination of the two.
So even though Lord Byron openly despises Claire, by the
end of the summer, he's still sleeping with her, and
so she gets pregnant.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I think this is Love Island, Ukay.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's almost like better, It's like Haunted Frankenstein, Love's watch It.
There are some historians who've speculated, but nothing's been proven
that actually this child is Percy Bisch Shelley's child, because
he and Claire are suspected of having an affair, and
depending on which source you're reading, it's also been said
that Pauladori is infatuated with either Lord Byron or Mary
(27:13):
Drama aside, it's impossible for these people to enjoy the outdoors,
so they basically spend every night by a fire at
the villa, reading spooky poems and stories while thunder and
lightning rattle the mansion. They're reading from a book named Phantasmagoriana,
which is a collection of German horror stories recently translated
(27:33):
into French. It has a bit of everything, ghosts, malevolent spirits,
family curses, haunted places, stuff like that. And they are
all drunk and high, so these stories hit pretty hard.
One night, as Lord Byron is reading, Percy jumps out
of his chair and bolts out of the room, and
he later says quote he'd seen a terrifying vision of Mary,
(27:55):
who'd been in the corner nursing their child with staring
eyes instead of nipple on her breast.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Dude, take a nap, freaking out, take a nap freaks
of orangelicense me down.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Stop with the opium for one second.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I nipples. That's fucking a new one from hate Ashbury.
I don't think.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
No, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
So after a while, Lord Byron switches things up and
tasks the group with writing their own horror stories. It's
a contest, and whoever creates the most chilling visceral work wins.
So by day they all go to their respective rooms
and pull out their ink pens and they write. And
at night they come back together and they share their
works and progress and they give each other feedback.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I love this. I want to do this with my friends,
but without so many drugs and alcohol, but without not
as many. I don't want to see eyeballs.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Let's not make a rule right now, Let's just like
see what happens.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Let's not let's not can go however, we.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Don't want to go into eyeball territory. But yeah, you're right. Well,
here's what I think is kind of cool. And I'm
giving the credit to Lord Byron, which is everyone's fighting
and fucking and.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Doing all this crazy shit.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
It's like, how about everyone gets creative and puts their
work on the paper and just puts their energy that way,
and then look what comes out of it. It's wild
what comes out of it. So it doesn't seem like Percy,
Bishelley or Claire contribute much to this little writing group
if anything. Instead they're working on their own projects that
have nothing to do with the horror genre. Lord Byron meanwhile,
(29:23):
takes inspiration from stories he's heard while traveling in Eastern
Europe of vampires. But those ones are a little different
than our modern vampire. Per the folklore that he heard,
they were grotesque, undead corpses that would rise out of
their graves at night like zombies and suck the blood
of the living. Different kind of monster, sure, different flavor,
(29:44):
more of a Roquefort situation with those ones. So he
starts a story that he never ends up finishing, but
in it he takes the concept of a vampire and
makes a little sexier. His vampire is a socially intelligent
British aristocrat who also has a thirst for blood, but
he is able to blend in with the upper class,
and he's a.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Romantic, imagine that, who are we talking about? And he's
so hot, he's so sexy.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So hot.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
But essentially, this version of the vampire is actually the
one that sticks in our culture, from Dracula to Twilight.
So that does come from Lord Byron's original idea.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
So when the.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Rest of the group here's this, they tell Lord Byron
he's onto something, but he doesn't listen and he scraps
the story. Basically, he doesn't enjoy writing horror or gothic horror.
But John Paula Dory takes it and he makes it
his own, and he eventually releases a novella called The
Vampire p yr And that is said to be the
first English language vampire story ever published.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Was Byron pissed that he fucking copied him?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
He doesn't seem like the tire.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
He seems like he's like, you've have mild idea whatever,
and he's got like a kerchief in his hand at
all times. But obviously, the inarguable winner of this writing
contest is nineteen year old Mary Shelley, whose entry starts
as a short story. It's so compelling that the others
urge her to expand it into a novel, and it
eventually becomes Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Which is the full title. I never knew that.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
The condensed refresher that no one needs but it will
be fun to do.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Is that.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Frankenstein's about a young scientist who makes the very risky
decision to play god, designing a creature that looks somewhat
human and using it electricity to jolt into life. Frankenstein's
creature is born with a kind heart, but he's very
lonely and he longs for connection, and he's beaten down
by people's fear as well as their cruelty toward him,
and he's abandoned by his own creator. All the poor
(31:42):
treatment hardens the creature until he becomes a monster, just
as Frankenstein's abandonment of the creature turns the scientist into
a monster. And if you watch Young Frankenstein, that's exactly
what happens.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There's a Frankenstein bar that we went to in Edinburgh
that was fucking incredible Scotland.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Ooh, did like did a thing go up?
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Every hour? Whatever the monster would come out that like
music would go down and like the crazy ass creepy
shit would happen there's like all these lights. It's a
fucking rat bar.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yes, that sounds so good, Okay.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So as this group leaves like Geneva at the end
of the summer, Mary does keep working on the story
when she gets back to England, but her writing is
sidelined once again by even more tragedy. And I have
to tell you, there's so many more things I'm going
to tell you that are sad that happen in her life.
It's like kind of devastating how much bad shed happens
to this woman. So her half sister Fanny, who is
(32:36):
a daughter of her mother's from a different relationship, takes
her own life, and then weeks after that, Percy's estranged wife, Harriet.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Also dies by suicide.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
So as horrible as all of that is, it does
allow Percy and Mary to finally get married, which they weren't.
They had kids together and stuff with the bay weren't married.
So they finally get married, but Mary is consumed with
guilt over Harriet's death. Year in eighteen seventeen, she finishes Frankenstein.
It's published in January of eighteen eighteen, on New Year's Day,
when she's twenty years old. It's released anonymously, so her
(33:10):
name is not on the book in the beginning, and
it's a small publisher, not particularly well known. There's only
about five hundred copies that they put out on very
cheap paper and with no fanfare. But people still end
up buying it, and then the people who buy it
and read it talk about it, and so the word
spreads that because it's just that good, and some critics
(33:31):
love it, some find it distasteful, but it captivates the
public's interest and nothing like it has ever existed before.
Frankenstein is as romantic and philosophical as it is horrifying,
and it's often called the first science fiction novel, and
it just keeps growing in popularity, even getting adapted into
incredibly popular stage plays. And because the book includes a
(33:53):
dedication to Mary's father, William Godwin and a preface that's
written by Percy, rumors swirl that one of these men
are the ones that actually wrote this book. Mary meanwhile,
stays in the shadows. She doesn't make much off of
the popularity of her book. It's not clear how much
she actually earns from it. We do know that the
bulk of the money goes to the publisher and of
(34:16):
course there's no copyright protections at the time, so the
theatrical productions that use her story don't pay her for it.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And then in eighteen eighteen, a year after Frankenstein's published,
Mary loses another daughter. One year old Clara dies in
Mary's arms after contracting dysentery. The year after that, Mary's
son William dies of malaria. So these losses compound Mary's
existing grief. She goes into a deep depression, with Percy
(34:44):
writing around this time, quote my dearest Mary, wherefore hast
thou gone and left me in this dreary world alone?
That's a Percy Bis Shelley line.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
So sad.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
But the same year Mary will give birth again, this
time to a son named Percy, and he will be
the one child that they have that lives to adulthood.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Tragedy seems to follow the whole Villa crew from Lake Geneva.
In eighteen twenty one, John Pauladori, the author of The
Vampire and Lord Byron's one time physician, takes his own life.
He's only twenty five years old. It's been speculated he
was suffering from depression and felt buried under the weight
of his gambling debts. Then the Shelleys continue to cross
(35:25):
paths with Lord Byron, though he does refuse to see Claire.
Mary stepsister Claire, and he treats her with hostility even
though they have a child together. They have a daughter
that Claire named Alba. Lord Byron takes custody of the baby,
renames her Alegra, and then cuts Claire off from ever
seeing her. It's just like a horrible thing. He takes
(35:46):
custody of the baby, but then puts her in foster
like rotating foster homes, and then in a convent. And
when Allegra is five years old, she dies from typhus
at the convent, and then Lord Byron dies two years
later of a fever. So Claire herself lives to be
eighty and of course mourns her daughter for the rest
of her life. Then, in eighteen twenty two, three years
(36:09):
after their son Percy is born, twenty nine year old
Percy Bishelly drowns in Italy when his sailboat gets caught
in a storm. So Mary's widowed. She's twenty five years old, Jesus,
and she will live another three decades. She dies when
she's fifty three of a suspected brain tumor, but she
never remarries. The year after Percy's death is when Mary
(36:30):
finally reveals that she is the author of Frankenstein. She
basically needs money and they're reissuing the novel so she
can get some cash. She only receives a small allowance
from Percy's family as a widow, and she mostly supports
herself and her young son by writing and taking on
editing work. But the reveal that Mary is the one
who wrote Frankenstein is literally unbelievable to some people. Akamen.
(36:56):
Critics immediately try to give the credit to her late husband,
thinking there's no way a woman could have written something
so dark and layered. But Frankenstein is so unmistakably hers.
It is about grief, alienation, and guilt, things Mary has
felt since childhood, and she even lifts passages from her
own personal journal, particularly dispatches about the wet, stormy weather
(37:17):
in Lake Geneva during the year without a Summer. Even
the premise itself of generating life from something not living
echoes the dream Mary had after her first daughter died.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
I dreamt that my little baby came to life. Again,
that it had been cold, and that we rubbed it
before the fire and it lived right. Both Mary and
Frankenstein's monster yearn for the type of unconditional love, a
motherly love that they've never had. Frankenstein has been interpreted
by many modern scholars as a feminist text, and one
that's clearly shaped by Mary's grief and longing for her
(37:51):
own mother.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
I know, right, it's so sad.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
As biographer Charlotte Gordon puts it, quote, Frankenstein is actually
a book about women. I would say it's a dystopian
novel about a world without mothers and a world without
strong women. Unchecked male ambition, says Mary Shelley is going
to wreak havoc on the world. And that's the story
behind one of the greatest works of Gothic fiction, Mary
Shelley's Franken.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Still Wow, what a fascinating story that I didn't know.
I didn't know, right, Oh my god. Good that's incredible,
so good, So great job, good job for Halloween especially.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Thank you, and great job marrying Muglashan once again, just
killing it.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
It's so good.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
That was incredible, great.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Job, Thank you, well, Happy Halloween, Thank.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
You, Happy Halloween. What are you going to be for
Halloween this year?
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Home?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I think this year I'm going to be a person
who's at home. I told someone what I was going
to be the other day, and now I can't remember
what it was. What a great joke that I can't remember?
What are you going to be for Halloween? To me?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
In a cute Halloween dress with maybe cat ears on
passing out candy to all the kids in our neighborhood.
It's my favorite.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Nice. Oh yeah, you have to go on full on candy.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, that's the best.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Well, enjoy thank you.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Last year we counted on a clicker and there was
nine hundred ninety eight kids before we had We ran
out of candy and had to turn the lights off.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
I know it could have kept going. Yeah, it's fucking weiry.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
It's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Well, I hope everybody that's listening is going to trick
or treat their asses off and really enjoy themselves.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
That's right, have so much fun. Be safe and watch
out for spooky spooky, watch out for volcanoes.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yeah, watch out for teenagers trying to egg your house,
it's real.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Goodbye, Elvis, Do you want a cookie?
Speaker 4 (39:49):
We come to this legal system for justice, but.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
We don't always get it. I'm Melissa Malbranch.
Speaker 4 (39:54):
And I'm Michael Foot. You might know me as everyone's
favorite lawyer from TikTok. I'm sick of the this whole.
Like my life is separate from my job, it ain't.
I'm a fear Steven the courtroom as well as at home.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
Every week on our podcast, Brief Recess, we take the
legal world out of the courtroom and into real life,
like can your boss actually fire you for what you
post online?
Speaker 4 (40:13):
What happens if ice knocks on your door?
Speaker 5 (40:15):
Oh? What should you do if you get arrested at
a protest?
Speaker 4 (40:17):
We break down insane headlines, answer real questions from listeners,
and share wild stories about what really happens in court.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Friends.
Speaker 5 (40:25):
Please remember, while Michael is a lawyer, he is not.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Your lawyer unless you want to hire me. I mean
that's a difference.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
I am everyone has the price, and I'm actually prittent
ship from.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
The Exactly Right Network.
Speaker 5 (40:36):
Brief Recess premieres on November thirteenth, with new episodes thursdays.
Watch Brief Recess on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
Listen to Brief Recess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
This has been an Exactly Right production.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Our editor is Aristotle Osceiveta.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Our researchers are Maaron McGlashan and Ali Elkin.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Follow the show on Instagram at my Favorite Murder.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And now you can watch us on exactly Right's YouTube page.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
While you're there, please like and subscribe.
Speaker 4 (41:20):
Good byebye
Hosts And Creators
Georgia Hardstark
Karen Kilgariff
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