Mary Shelley's love affair with cemeteries

Even a casual reader of the classics could guess that Mary Shelley was fascinated by the macabre.

Not everyone would necessarily expect to hear, though, just how obsessed with cemeteries she was.

Losing her mother just days after birth left an indelible mark on Shelley, and she was drawn to the gravesite throughout her life — so much that one scholar has written that her “only real ‘mother’ was a tombstone.”

JSTOR has an in-depth look at how, for Shelley, love and death were inexorably connected ... but make sure to grab a blanket pre-emptively for the chills that will run up and down your spine.