Did Mary Shelley Really Have a Piece of Her Husband’s Heart?

Written by

Leah Rachel von Essen

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

The myth: Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (1818) and arguably the inventor of science fiction, kept the preserved heart of her late husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in her writing desk for the rest of her life. It’s audacious. It’s wild. It’s romantic, in a Gothic kind of way. But is it true?

Well, sort of.

How would Mary Shelley even have gotten her husband’s heart?

In July 1822 Percy Shelley was on a boat, the Don Juan, headed to Lerici, Italy, with his friend Edward Williams when it sank in a summer storm, drowning them both. Because of quarantine laws at the time, the bodies needed to be burned to ashes on the beach. Mary Shelley was not present at the cremation, but Percy’s friends Edward John Trelawny, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt were in attendance.

Trelawny recorded what happened next: After the cremation, when the fire was still white-hot, he saw that Percy’s heart wasn’t burned, and he snatched it out of the flames. Later that summer Byron wrote to a friend, “All of Shelley was consumed except his heart, which would not take the flame.”

It might seem wild to us today to think of keeping part of a loved one’s body as a souvenir. But it was less strange in Victorian times, when an obsession with memento mori, or keepsakes of the dead, made it standard to take photographs with your deceased loved ones, keep locks of their hair, and even arrange to have your heart saved after death to be buried with or given to your spouse or lover. Given the melodramatics of the Shelleys’ group of friends (these were men of the Romantic era, after all), it’s not surprising that they’d keep something that they believed to be the poet’s heart. (Byron wanted Shelley’s skull for himself, but it broke before he could take it home.)

Hunt ended up with the relic at first. He had the nerve to write to Mary Shelley to tell her she couldn’t have it, because his “love for my friend” overruled “the claims of any other love, man’s or woman’s.” Byron believed Mary should have it, however, and she was eventually given the cherished remnant of her husband. After her death in 1851 the Shelleys’ son found a piece of the organ in a box that she had kept on her desk, alongside some of his father’s ashes and a passage from one of his poems.

But was it really a heart?

Mary Shelley definitely had a preserved piece of her husband’s body that she believed was his heart. Physicians at the time speculated that a bout of tuberculosis (a common disease in the 19th century) could have allowed the organ to survive cremation: The disease can calcify, or harden, parts of the heart, which could have naturally preserved it. But is that what actually happened?

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

In 1885 the London journal The Athenaeum published an article arguing that it was not Percy Shelley’s heart that had survived but one of his other organs. According to the article’s author, the heart, being hollow, is easily destroyed in cremation, but the liver, being the most solid internal organ, can resist intense heat. Claiming to have witnessed many cremations in Italy, the author reported that the liver could survive the process. In addition, the author said, Shelley’s liver would have been saturated with seawater, which could have helped it survive the heat. Moreover, after the fire the organ was shriveled and burnt, so it could have been easily mistaken by Shelley’s artsy friends for something that it wasn’t. Finally, the author suggested that “some competent anatomist” study the organ to determine if it was the real thing. Or as The New York Times reported, to see “whether the cherished remains be really the poet’s heart or his liver, both of which were equally useful to him while he lived, and both of which should be regarded as equally valuable still.”

No one was able to test his remains, however. Shelley’s ashes were buried in Rome in the Protestant Cemetery, and what was left of the mystery organ was buried alongside Mary Shelley in her family’s tomb at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, England.

The consensus

Mary Shelley had something of her husband’s body that was definitely from a vital organ, and she believed what she had was his heart. Whatever it was, given Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragic death at a young age and Mary Shelley’s tumultuous love for him, in this light it may truly be the thought that counts.

Discover More