Mary Shelley’s Obsession with the Cemetery

The author of Frankenstein always saw love and death as connected. She visited the cemetery to commune with her dead mother. And with her lover.

From jstor.org By: Bess Lovejoy 

“Her mother’s grave: the setting seems an unusually grim, even ghoulish locale for reading, writing, or love-making,” Gilbert notes. Yet for Mary Shelley, the cemetery was not merely a repository of rotting corpses, but a site of knowledge and connection: It was a place where she read to deepen her literary education and her communion with her mother, and a place where she was inducted into mysteries of sexuality. Literary, familial, and carnal knowledge were all bound together in one place.

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