Open MS. Abinger c. 56 in the Shelley-Godwin Archive and the working draft of Frankenstein appears in faded ink. Mary Shelley’s hurried handwriting carries the text. A second hand, darker and often crowded into the margins, crosses out words and proposes alternatives.
The second hand belonged to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The book belonged to Mary. She was eighteen.
Mary Shelley’s surviving papers include two different kinds of intimate record: a shared travel diary she kept with Percy and the separate manuscript notebooks in which she drafted Frankenstein. She was a teenager abroad, living inside scandal and complicated relationships while producing one of the most influential novels in English. The pages feel less like a monument and more like a table strewn with working paper.
What follows are eight lessons from Mary Shelley’s diaries and manuscript notebooks. They sit alongside other journaling habits of successful people, but the mixture of shared diary, coded entries, draft pages, and grief journals gives them a character of their own.
If the shared travel diary is the thread you want to follow, how to keep a travel journal covers the format she was improvising.
1. Write Down the Dream, Even If You Cannot Explain It
The most famous account in Mary Shelley’s writing is not from her diary at all. It is from the introduction she wrote for the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, recounting the night the idea came to her during the cold, stormy summer of 1816, when she, Percy, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori spent evenings together beside Lake Geneva. Their conversations touched on experiments with life and electricity, and Byron proposed that each person write a ghost story.
Mary went to bed late. Then this:
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me … I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
Source: Mary Shelley, introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, dated 15 October 1831.
Scholars argue about whether the dream actually happened the way she described, or whether she dressed it up fifteen years later to make her authorship more palatable to an audience that did not like to credit women with monsters. Either way, the lesson holds. Mary trusted the image enough to write it down, and she trusted the writing down enough to build a three-volume novel on top of it. Most of us let the image fade by breakfast.
Try this tonight: keep a notebook within arm’s reach of your bed. The next time you wake from a vivid dream or wander into a half-dream while drifting off, write three sentences before you do anything else. Not the meaning. Just the image. The meaning can come later.
In Paris, in the summer of 1814, sixteen-year-old Mary and the twenty-one-year-old Percy bought a small green notebook together. They had just eloped. Percy was already married to someone else. Mary’s father had cut them off. The notebook, they decided, would record their life together. They took turns writing in it.
An early entry shows the tone:
I said – Mary look. the sun rises over france [sic]. we walked over the sands to the Inn. We were shewn into an apartment that answered the purpose both of sitting & sleeping room. Mary was there.
To which Mary, in her own hand, adds:
Shelley was also with me.
Source: The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford University Press, 1987), entry of July 1814.
This is what I think people miss about journaling. Most journals are private by design, but the form does not have to be solitary. The Shelleys used a single notebook to braid their thoughts together, the way some couples now share a Google Doc or a Notes app. Each entry is a small act of “I was here, with you, and we both saw the sun.”
If the thought of journaling alone feels lonely or stalled, or you are not sure what to put on the page, try it with one other person. The notebook will become a third object in the room.
3. Use Coded Symbols for the Things You Cannot Yet Name
Mary’s diary is not all sunsets. Her relationship with Percy developed inside a tangled family situation, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, traveled and lived closely with them. By 1816, Claire was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child. The diary often records this strained household in compressed language.
Throughout the diary, Mary uses abbreviations and small symbols instead of spelling out every event. The page for Tuesday, 5 November 1816 carries a row of marks, a figure of one hundred pounds, and the word “America.” Editors have connected the entry to discussions about Claire and her unborn child, but the compressed notation does not yield a simple, certain decoding.
We cannot fully decode every mark. That is part of what makes the page useful – private shorthand runs through Emerson’s notebooks too. A symbol can preserve the presence of a subject without forcing the writer to explain it in full.
Try this tonight: invent one personal symbol – a star, an asterisk, a single Greek letter – that stands for the topic you most resist writing about head-on. Use it in tomorrow’s entry once. You do not have to explain it. The symbol is a placeholder for thoughts you are not ready to write in plain words yet.
4. Welcome the Edits in the Margin
The Bodleian’s MS. Abinger c. 56 holds the working draft of Frankenstein. Mary’s hand is lighter. Percy’s marginal comments are darker, packed into the corners and between the lines. He suggests “yellow” for the creature’s skin in place of “dun.” He suggests the hair should be “of a lustrous black.” He swaps “handsome” for “beautiful.” Mary accepts many changes and rejects or revises others.
Here is one of the most famous edits, from folio 21r. Mary’s draft reads (Percy’s bracketed insertions are in square brackets):
Great God! His ~~dun~~ [yellow] skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was ^ [of a lustrous black &] flowing and his teeth of a pearly whiteness …
Source: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, draft notebook, Bodleian Library MS. Abinger c. 56, folio 21r, in The Shelley-Godwin Archive.
Percy’s visible hand on the manuscript has sometimes been used to exaggerate his role in the novel. The manuscript evidence supports a clearer description: Mary authored the novel, while Percy acted as a close editor and collaborator on parts of the draft.
The practical lesson is not that every editor should be obeyed. It is that a draft can survive another person’s marks. Hand the page to someone you trust, consider each suggestion, and keep authorship of the final choice. The famous image of the yellow-skinned, black-haired creature carries evidence of that collaboration in the margin.
5. Record Disappointment in Plain Language
Frankenstein did not slide into print. It went to several publishers, with Percy handling the submissions on her behalf, and came back rejected. Her diary entry for June 1817 records the moment a publisher returned the manuscript:
… Frank.[enstein] sent back.
Three words. No commentary. No tears in the margin. If you want to see what a short entry can look like, that is the whole model.
When it was finally accepted, the entry is just as flat:
A letter from Lackington.
Source: The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, entries of June 1817 and August 1817.
I find this oddly comforting. A teenager wrote a novel that has been in print for more than two hundred years, and the day it was rejected she wrote three words about it and went on with her life. The day it was accepted she wrote four.
The journal does not have to dramatize what is happening to you. Thoreau’s two million words are mostly weather and observation. Sometimes the most honest thing it can do is hold the bare fact, dated, on the page, while the rest of the day continues. Then, years later, when you flip back, the entry still tells you exactly what happened.
Try this tonight: when something is rejected or postponed this week – a pitch, an application, a draft sent back for revision – record it in the smallest possible number of words. Date it. Move on. The shape of the entry will become its own form of resilience.
6. Let the Journal Carry the Grief You Cannot Speak
Three years after she opened this volume, her son William died. He had been a baby when she began writing Frankenstein. On the inside of a new journal volume, she dates it carefully and then writes one of the most piercing lines in the diaries:
Journal
1816
Begun July 21 – 1816
Ended with my happiness June 7th 1819.
Source: The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, Volume II, p. 112.
Three years later again, on July 8, 1822, Percy drowned in a boating accident. He loved boats and had never learned to swim. She had, by coincidence, closed her previous journal volume on that same date. When she opened a new one that October, she wrote:
On the 8th of July I finished my journal. The date still remains – the fatal 8th – a monument to show that all ended then. And I begin again? – oh never! But several motives induce me, when the day has gone down, and all is silent around me, steeped in sleep, to pen, as occasion wills, my reflexions & feelings.
Source: The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, entry of 2 October 1822 – the first of what she came to call her Journal of Sorrow.
She vows never to write again. Then, in the same sentence, she keeps writing. That is grief on a page. It refuses, and then it continues.
Mary’s journals show the form as something a person can return to even when earlier reasons for writing have collapsed. That persistence connects her pages with the notebooks Frederick Douglass kept, Martin Luther King Jr.’s reflective writings, and Einstein’s travel diaries, although each writer asked something different of the page.
7. Start Younger Than You Think You Are Allowed To
Mary was sixteen when she started the shared diary and eighteen when she drafted Frankenstein. She did not have a college degree or a publishing track record. She had read a lot of her parents’ books – her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, her father was William Godwin – but the act of putting a notebook on a table in a rented house beside Lake Geneva and writing a novel in it was hers.
You do not need a system to start. The novel that helped shape the modern image of the scientist-overreacher was drafted by a teenager working in rented rooms. The credentials came after the work began.
The same pattern appears in Bruce Lee’s pocket affirmations, Benjamin Franklin’s daily virtue chart, begun in his early twenties, and Leonardo’s early sketchbooks from his years as an apprentice. The work starts before the credentials.
Try this tonight: if you have been waiting to feel ready, write the first page anyway. Date it. Put your name on the inside cover. Treat the notebook as if a future biographer might one day open it. They almost certainly will not. But the way you write changes when you let yourself believe they might.
8. End With a Line You Can Hand to Someone You Love
Mary’s last diary volume, written in 1844, ends with a passage she attributed to Edmund Burke. After years of writing through grief, rejection, work, and family life, she closed the surviving journal not with her own words but with these:
Preserve always a habit of giving (but still with discretion), however little, as a habit not to be lost. The first thing is justice. Whatever one gives ought to be from what one would otherwise spend, not from what one wd otherwise pay. To spend little & give much, is the highest glory a man can aspire to.
Source: transcribed by Mary Shelley into her final journal volume, in The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, ed. Feldman and Scott-Kilvert.
She had a surviving son, also named Percy. The passage may have carried private meaning for him, but the journal does not tell us that directly. What we can say is that the surviving diary sequence, begun around a teenage elopement and later marked by coded family tensions, the deaths of three children, and Percy’s drowning, ends with practical moral advice. The Frankenstein draft belongs to a separate set of manuscript notebooks.
That is what a lifelong journal does, and it is the thing fourteen people who kept one for life have in common. It collects everything you went through, and then, at the end, it lets you choose what gets passed on. Mary chose generosity.
Want more notebooks like Mary Shelley’s?
Mary and Percy also appear in couples who journaled together – shared notebooks, not only solo pages.
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Featured image: Richard Rothwell, Mary Shelley, exhibited 1840. She was forty-two, and had outlived almost everyone in this story. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
