Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)
Percy Shelley drowned while sailing in 1822, at the age of 29. Shelley’s body and those of his two sailing companions were found 10 days later, identifiable only by their clothing. Shelley had stashed a book of John Keats poems in his pocket.
The poet was cremated, but for some reason, his heart refused to burn. Modern-day physicians believe it may have calcified due to an earlier bout with tuberculosis. Though Percy’s friend, Leigh Hunt, originally claimed the heart—he was there for the funeral pyre-style cremation and felt he had a right to keep the unscathed organ—it was eventually turned over to Mary.
“When Shelley’s corpse washed ashore, a friend identified it by a copy of Keats’s 1820 volume in the coat pocket, which he knew Shelley had taken with him. Then, after cremation in which Shelley’s heart, hardened by calcium, did not burn, this same friend snatched it from the embers and presented it to Mary Shelley, who kept it thereafter in her desk, wrapped in a copy of ‘Adonais.”
Instead of burying it with the rest of his remains in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Mary kept the heart in a silken shroud, and is said to have carried it with her nearly everywhere for almost 30 years. In 1852, a year after she died, Percy’s heart was found in her desk drawer. It was wrapped in the pages of one of his last poems, Adonais. The heart was eventually buried in the family vault with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, when he died in 1889.
Frankenstein author Mary Shelley kept her dead husband’s heart and carried it with her for almost 30 years until she died in 1851. It was found in a desk drawer a year later, wrapped in a copy of one of his final poems. [source]
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