Shelley was little help - his unconventional attitudes to love strained her devotion to its limits. During the nine turbulent years Mary and Shelley were together, Claire was the ever-present third, whose manipulative behaviour often drove Mary to despair. It was much harder to cope with her jealousy of Claire, her step-sister, who had run away with them and was also in love with Shelley. When she eloped with Shelley, Mary had been quite prepared to suffer condemnation from society. The novel was conceived in a contest with him and Lord Byron to tell ghost stories.

By then, she had been living for two years in a scandalous relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married with children. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything else she undertakes, almost invincible.' Mary Shelley began 'Frankenstein' in 1814, when she was eighteen. I came to Australia from London in my twenties, as an account manager for Leo Burnett advertising agency.'She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. I am a 'mother of three', who are grown up and scattered to the corners of the globe. What else? I am a Londoner by birth and now live on the north shore of lovely Sydney.

One was surrounding the circumstances of Mary’s sister Fanny’s suicide, and the other was the mystery of the ‘Neapolitan child’, a child that Shelley falsely registered in Naples as his and Mary’s. I did ‘make up’ or at least offer my own interpretation, to at least two unexplained incidents in the Shelley’s lives. When I bemoaned this compulsive behaviour to my lovely editor, she continually pointed out that it was fiction and I could make it up! I once spent a week researching steamboats for a half paragraph at a point when this is Shelley’s obsession. I have a research gene that meant I could not leave a subject alone, however trivial. I also discovered that my research consultancy has not just been a fluke career. I also spent a fortune to buy the books to have in my office, because unfortunately, there is a mountain of extant information on these people. The Mitchell kept a trolley load for me that made it pleasant. Coffee shops are also great, but the volume of reference books I needed made this very difficult. I discovered that writing is a lonely business and that it is important to seek out conducive spaces like the library to avoid being bored.

The writing has meant a steep personal learning curve. In Sydney I did most of my textual research in the Mitchell Library.

Almost Invincible by Suzanne Burdon