Four interlocking paths through the churchyard where the author of Frankenstein sleeps. Two hundred years on, the Romantics return.
Shelley's Heart is a location-aware literary experience set across St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth, the ground where Mary Shelley lies buried. Developed with the Storyplaces research platform at Bournemouth University and launched for the bicentenary of Frankenstein, it threads four interlocking narratives through the churchyard around her tomb.
Each visitor chooses a path. Each path traces a different route across the graveyard and centres a different figure. The paths intersect, diverge, and resolve around the grave at the heart of it all.
Widow at twenty-four. Author of Frankenstein at eighteen. Her path walks her grief, her authorship, and the creation that refuses to stay on the page.
Poet, aristocrat, scandal. The man who proposed the ghost story contest at Villa Diodati, from which Frankenstein was born. His path traces the cost of charisma.
Dead at twenty-five beneath a stone that names no one. His path walks the letters to Fanny Brawne, the odes he did write, and the work he did not get to finish.
Drowned at twenty-nine. His body burned on an Italian beach. Only his heart came out of the fire, wrapped in silk, returned to Mary. His path is the search for that heart.
St. Peter's churchyard, central Bournemouth. Walking distance from the town centre and the railway station.
Any smartphone with a signal. The experience runs in the browser. Nothing to download.
Walk at your own speed. A single path takes around forty minutes. All four, a full evening.
From the 2018 launch in St. Peter's churchyard, Bournemouth.
Shelley's Heart was developed as a practice-based research project exploring how location-aware storytelling can bring literary and historical material to life in physical space. The project contributes to a growing body of work on transmedia, interactive, and locative narrative, and remains freely available for ongoing study.
Visitor data from both the live and demo modes informs continuing research into how audiences engage with distributed narrative in real-world settings.
Gyori, B. (2019). Reanimating Shelley's Heart: breathing new life into locative learning with dual process design. Media Practice and Education, 20 (4).
Jones, A., Gyori, B., Hargood, C., Charles, F., & Green, D. (2018). Shelley's Heart: Experiences in Designing a Multi-Reader Locative Narrative. Narrative and Hypertext, Baltimore.
The one piece of him that did not burn, and the one piece she could not let go.