Some were beautiful, clean and romantic (John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) Others gave me a feeling of a hair lodged in my throat after unknowingly being swallowed with my food. I still can't look at the online sample of Thomas Carlyle's hair without hacking a little. Despite this, I gave respectable time to each lock of hair because it was as close to interacting with George Washington or Napolean as we can have two hundred years after their deaths.
As wonderful as it was to see these other samples, I wanted to see the book specifically for Mary Shelley's Hair. She is a critical figure in both literary and pop culture history, creating an icon that lives large and beyond her story. Moreover, she did it as a challenge to egotistical men (including her husband) that foolishly dismissed her as a teenage girl in love. Her lock of hair was also one of the first things I ever saw on display at the Ransom Center when I was an undergraduate, one of the first things that let me know how special this collection and my university were for acquiring such a thing. This hair was on her head as she trudged, pregnant and on foot, through Europe with her poet husband who's head was lost in the clouds. This hair was on her head, on that dark and stormy night, when the monster in her head came alive on the page. It was a part of her, and it waits between the pages of this book for anyone who wants to touch history.