He Loved Her With His Whole Heart

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen - a novel about a man who couldn't let the dead stay dead. Her husband Percy drowned six years into their marriage, off the Italian coast. His friends burned the body on the beach, but his heart wouldn't take the flame. Physicians theorize it had calcified from tuberculosis. Turned to stone. There was a fight over it. Another poet claimed it, insisted his love outranked a widow's. Mary got it back. She wrapped what she believed was his heart in silk and pages from his poetry and kept it in her writing desk. Twenty-nine years.

When she died in 1851, her son opened the desk. The heart lay nested among locks of hair from his dead siblings - three children who never lived past three, children he'd never known. Mary Shelley spent three decades as a professional author, editing her husband's work, raising her surviving boy. Every night she slept in the room with the physical remnants of everyone she'd loved and lost. The woman who imagined reanimating the dead kept her husband's heart in a drawer.

She never wrote about it.

Ever.