The Pearls: the story behind the story

Damned if I can remember the exact circumstances around writing this story. What I do know is that this is my fairy-tale-ization of the marriage of Percy and Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of two Regency intelligensia celebrities, William Godwin and proto-feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft. (Rather like being the offspring of Alan Greenspan and Gloria Steinem...) Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary -- in a macabre little twist, rumor has it that Percy and Mary consummated their relationship on her mother's grave. The small detail that Percy already had a wife in an Irish madhouse didn't give anyone in that bohemian circle the slightest twinge, but Mary had no easy time of it. Constantly pregnant and losing five of her six babies in infancy, she struggled to be both muse and housekeeper to an increasingly dissheveled menage. Percy liked to wander hither and thither, and it was Mary's job to deal with the nannies and pack the silverware and figure out what the HELL they could have for dinner at nine o'clock at night on an Alp. That she wrote Frankenstein in the middle of all this is nothing short of a miracle.

Then Percy went out for a sail on an Italian lake one day with a friend, and they never came back. The great poet had never learned to swim. Mary refused all help from Shelley's philistine father, and worked tirelessly to assure her husband's place in the canon of English literature.

This story is also an homage to some of the greats of Anglo-Irish high fantasy, Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison, to name two. Yes, I know it's overdone, over-elaborate and over-ornate, but what fun it was to let all of those defects in my character come out and run riot! And frankly, if you think I'm over the top, please go get yourself a copy of Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, which is written ENTIRELY IN PERFECT ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH.