A charming two-bedroom apartment at 87 Marchmont Street in London is up for sale for £1,025,000 – and it is on the exact site where Frankenstein author Mary Shelley once lived.
For some house-hunters this will be a monstrously alluring property, Daily Mail reports.
The paper explains that Shelley moved into a house where the Bloomsbury apartment building now stands in 1815 with her then-lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. A blue plaque outside the property – erected in 2009 – highlights the literary significance of the site.
Mary was just 16 when she fell for the older Percy, then aged 21 and married to his first wife, Harriet Westbrook.
The couple courted in the Gothic graveyard at St Pancras Old Church – which is just a short walk from Marchmont Street. Here, she fell for his ‘wild, intellectual, unearthly looks’ and the pair allegedly consummated their relationship on her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s tombstone.
Mary’s father, the philosopher and novelist William Godwin, disapproved of their relationship, and so they ran away together to Europe with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.
The trio travelled through France and Switzerland until a lack of funds forced them to return to the UK. Back on British soil, Mary and Percy lived in several addresses – one of which was on Marchmont Street.
Claire moved in with the couple. According to Exploring London, their landlady was named Mrs Harbottle, and it was during this period that Mary and Percy welcomed a son, William, who was nicknamed ‘Willmouse’.
They moved out in 1816, leaving England to reside with the Romantic poet Lord Byron at his mansion, Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva.
It was here, aged just 18 that Mary Shelley began to write what would become ‘Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus’ – the book that shaped her legacy.
