I’ve been in London the past two days. Today I went with two student interns and filmed our first scene at The Serpentine in Hyde Park. Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the poet’s first wife, drowned there in 1816. Less than a month later, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were married. Some might see the speed as monstrous. Mary had already written the first draft of Frankenstein by then, so that might be the right adjective.
Harriet was buried under a false name and the suicide was covered up. It was a sad, anonymous end all too common in early 19th-century England. She was pregnant with another woman’s child when she died. Fallen, abandoned, and despairing.
The filming was surreal, since it turned sunny at The Serpentine and people on a charity walk were crowding all around us. One of the themes became Harriet’s forgotten death in England’s literary history…
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Parkinson's Disease Diary 