ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley was approached by Edward Trelawny, who was intent on writing a group biography of Byron, Percy Shelley and himself. What Freud calls a 'screen memory' is not a record of what actually happened in the past, but instead can be more accurately described as a history of the event's remembrance and re-remembrance. As Freud has noted, screen memories may be actual memories or imagined fantasies constructed later in life to explain ambivalence. Traumatic incident so extended and detailed and concerned not with the heroine's childhood, about which they learn very little, but about Neville's. In Mary Shelley's case it is no coincidence that dreams and emotional outbursts recur at moments of desire in the texts, while 'The Mourner' is told in the style of a post-mortem flashback. The Mourner's heroine is now a split woman, going by the names of Clarice Eversham or Ellen Burnet, the former her pre-parricide identity and the latter her post-parricide self.
