"Mother of Horror: The Birth of Mary Shelley" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Elixir of Immortality: A Modern-Day Alchemist's Discovery of the Philosopher's Stone"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY August 30 Mother of Horror: The Birth of Mary Shelley (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.) On August 30th, 1797, a girl was born in London who would grow up to write the single most influential work of horror and science fiction in the English language, and would spend the next two centuries having her own authorship of it quietly questioned, her actual creative process compressed into a tidier story than the one that really happened. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's mother died eleven days after giving birth to her; the daughter would go on to write, at nineteen, a novel obsessed with creation, loss, and the terrible cost of bringing something new into the world. Frankenstein's own origin story has become almost as mythologized as the novel itself, and at least two of its most repeated claims don't survive close contact with the historical re...