I would celebrate! We are a team. We are invested in each other’s success.
If you would be upset, or feel inadequate, in response to your wife’s unprecedented success, you simply do not have the temperament for marriage.
And even if you are envious, it’s better to be remembered as someone’s spouse for centuries than forgotten after a few decades, like most people are. Marrying someone who’ll be remembered for centuries is a major achievement in its own right.
The right husband would be proud, not threatened
He was, very. He always believed in her genius and coaxed her to turn the short ghost story into a novel. That’s why his early death hung over her so much.
What a bizarre rant.
Mary Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, a famous poet.
Which doesn’t diminish Mary Shelley’s accomplishments, regardless.
And what if we swapped the genders?
You could do the same to Mileva Marić but that would make you an asshole.
Also kind of ridiculous, because looking deeper into it, Lord Byron wrote “Fragment of a Novel” which seems to be credited as the first vampire themed English literature, though he never finished it.
So literally the competition produced the Vampire and Frankenstein theme in English horror. It’s more interesting to me that a bunch of writers played a little game and basically invented so much.
Byron’s story created the vampire romance genre though
What this really tells me is that I should join a writing competition with my wife.
And cultivate a serious opium habit
And join a national liberation movement
Not Byron. It was Polidori.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori
Edit: Polidori wrote his story based on an abandoned work by Byron.
It was Byron’s story for the competition. Polidori later based a novel on Byron’s story.
You’re right. Byron wrote and abandoned a story on vampires and Polidori based his work on that.
Mary Shelley’s actual husband, Percy Shelley, was a poet. Imagine having a career as a professional writer and your wife, who’s never published a work of fiction ever, writes a novel for a competition and becomes so famous for it, your name becomes a footnote in history under hers.
I’m all for supporting the endeavors and success of your spouse, but that still has to sting a little bit.
Percy Shelley at least gets due credit as a poet among poetry lovers, and a break on the prose competition because it’s not his genre. And Byron has his own fame/notoriety. But John Polidori is like Ron Goldman, a footnote in his own murder.
iirc Percy was very proud of her work
Yeah I did a whole paper on Shelly’s Frankenstein in college and while doing research about her and the book learned he was a real swell gent for the time. Hell he was better than almost any rich white guy now.
Marry Shelley’s husband was not John Polidori, it was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Surprised no one picked this up. Percy was an amazing poet.
John Polidori was in love with Mary, but was not married to her
The OP does not suggest that John Polidori was her husband. There’s a comma between “her husband” and “John Polidori”. And in fact the post seems to be correct (judging by Wiki):
In 1816—at the suggestion of Lord Byron—Mary, Percy, John Polidori and Byron himself, each agreed to try writing a ghost story
Well, it’s an unclear structure. Putting a comma before and after someone’s name is correct if including the name would not change the meaning of the sentence, as in this case. In the case of OP’s sentence, it could have implied that Polidori was Mary Shelley’s husband as his name, while important to the meaning of the sentence, was included in a list of other people, including Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley’s husband, and Lord Byron.
I agree it is ambiguous, however usually you don’t separate parentheticals by commas inside a comma-separated list, so the “more likely” reading is the one without the parenthetical.
An unambiguous version that doesn’t diminish the joke would be “Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and her husband”. But alas it’s difficult for writers to find ambiguities in texts that they write (that’s what editors are for).
I see the comma now, but Percy Bysshe Shelley was an incredible writer who is studied and lauded, rightly, on his own merit. Anyone reading this thinking Mary’s husband is insignificant compared to Frankenstein needs to read Ozymandias or The Masque of Anarchy right now and witness this beautiful, humanistic and liberatory spirit.
I think that was just poor grammar, seems like “her husband” and John Polidori are two separate characters in the statement not that John Polidori was an elaboration of what her husband’s name was. But that’s how I read it initially too.
As Balsoft said, that is part of the punchline of the joke: People only know him now as Mary Shelly’s husband.
I mean, I’m a big fan of Percy Shelley’s poetry, the fact that he isn’t taught more IMO has to do with the liberatory character of his writing more than he was an inferior writer to Mary. Mary’s book is great, but PBS was an incredible writer whose work has wide cultural significance, even if we aren’t like forced to read it in school or whatever.
People should read more PBS, he should be more popular.
Folks Missing that she beat Lord Byron
It would be great - only someone really insecure would have a problem??
Byron was a super-famous poet before this competition, and he wrote
Draculawhat would late inspire Dracula during this, not to belay the point Mary Shelley is far more well known generally than George Gordon Byron. But ‘Lord Byron’ is still very well known if short being a household like Shelley, especially in the UK or with those with even a passing internet in English language poetryFun facts, The competition was inspired by the gloominess caused by the ‘Year without a Summer’ which it was the time 1816
And Shelly’s mother was Mary Wollstonecraft an early women’s liberation writer and activist ‘the Mother of modern Feminism’ (very influential on the suffragetes)
and Byron’s daughter but not the one he had with Shelly was Ada Lovelace the OG coderhe wrote Dracula
Lord Byron Stoker?
Ah fuck yeah I was wrong there, he wrote Fragment of a Novel which while unfinished did later inspire Stoker and Dracula by way of Polidori’s The Vampyre
Lord Byron was no slouch either. She overshadowed someone who puts off a decent light himself, that is how badly he was owned.
Tbf, beating Lord Byron at things was a common pastime for women in his life. See also, his daughter Ada Lovelace, the mother of computer programming.
She’s Byron’s daughter?! TIL
I would be so proud 🖤
I know next to nothing about this. Was it her first novel?
Yup. She did write a lot, mind you, but not really to be published. Her father ran a publishing house and I think she wrote a childrens verse for him when she was a kid but otherwise it was journals and imaginative stuff as a kid. The first thing she properly wrote was, indeed, Frankenstein. If memory serves.
That book is creepy af and very unsettling.
Naturally I’d try to be supportive but it would be hard not to get a little competitive if you knew the long term outcome along the lines of “I need to step up my game”
The Vampyre doesn’t get enough love 😿
