A: After Mary's husband Percy Shelley drowned while sailing in 1822, his body was cremated on the beach with fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron looking on. As the story goes, Shelley's heart refused to burn - at least according to Lord Byron, who admittedly was the Pinocchio of British Romantic Poetry.

So while Shelley's cremains were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, his heart was given to his wife Mary (of Frankenstein fame), who wrapped it in a copy of a poem Shelley had written - and promptly stuck it in a drawer. Sounds pretty creepy. And while it is fairly unsentimental on one hand, on the other: What are you going to do with your dead husband's unburnable heart, anyway? Put it on display? Wrap it in a new poem every year?

So, basically it remained in storage until Mary Shelley's death almost 30 years later. Eventually, however, it was buried in Dorset, England.