I’ll tell you what. as someone who has studied Mary Shelley very closely for over a decade — I’ve read more biographies on her than on anyone else, I have gone to Shelley archives, half of my MA thesis was about her biographical context — it’s interesting to me that so many people take umbrage with Del Toro’s use of a Byron quote at the end of Frankenstein (2025).
I’ve seen people go as far as to argue that it displaces the feminism of the novel or is some kind of slap in the face to Mary Shelley as author. But, like it or not, Mary Shelley loved and admired Byron. It’s interesting how much misinformation is out there to suggest that they had some lifelong, antagonistic beef but the reality is far from it. Mary was the one who, with the help of Percy, persuaded Byron to go to Geneva with them — we would not have the scary story contest that birthed Frankenstein had Mary not wanted to Byron to join them in Geneva in the first place. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that he resented that she “won” the contest — in fact, I don’t think anybody was thinking about it in those terms (and I have some bigger issues with the fixation on the contest in the first place). In fact, Mary sent Byron a publsher’s copy of Frankenstein and Byron, in turn, privately corrected Walter Scott when the literary critic assumed that Frankenstein (at that time, anonymously published) was written by Byron. After Percy’s death, Byron and Mary grew closer and, when Byron died, she mourned him tremendously; in perhaps the move obvious display of her admiration of him, a protagonist in her third novel, The Last Man, is very obviously a stand-in for Byron and though he is flawed, the novel decidedly presents him as a noble and good man. It is a novel that really embodies her deep loneliness after the deaths of the men she loved and Byron, importantly, is central to that expression.
People often suggest that Mary Shelley and Byron were antagonistic to each other either because he was threatened by her literary prowess or because Percy was god-awful to Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister. But the reality is that the former isn’t substantiated by evidence and the latter really didn’t seem to dampen the good will between them at all. The tension between Claire and Mary probably deserves its own post, but it’s dishonest to suggest that Mary was some champion of her — in fact, Mary often (in my reading of her writing) found Claire exhausting, even embarrassing, and she had ample reasons to resent her, including the very real possibility that Claire and Percy were sleeping with one another.
I understand why there seems to be an impulse to distance and even misrepresent the relationship between Mary and Byron: in presenting Mary as a feminist icon or even in just admiring her as nineteenth century woman novelist, it’s understandable that people want to contort her to fit our own progressive ideals. Byron was an awful man in many respects and it’s more digestible to modern readers if we believe she hated him or held him accountable for his wrongs. But the truth is that she did love him, that she considered him both a literary inspiration and an emotional pillar in her life. That GDT’s film ends in a Byron quote is actually, in truth, more in keeping with how Mary Shelley saw herself and her novel — not separate from, in competition against, or superior to Byron’s work and legacy but in tandem and perpetually in conversation with him and his artistry.
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