And even if you are envious, it's better to be remembered as someone's spouse for centuries than forgotten after a few decades, like most people are. Marrying someone who'll be remembered for centuries is a major achievement in its own right.

He was, very. He always believed in her genius and coaxed her to turn the short ghost story into a novel. That's why his early death hung over her so much.

What this really tells me is that I should join a writing competition with my wife.

Not Byron. It was Polidori.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori

Edit: Polidori wrote his story based on an abandoned work by Byron.

Percy Shelley at least gets due credit as a poet among poetry lovers, and a break on the prose competition because it's not his genre. And Byron has his own fame/notoriety. But John Polidori is like Ron Goldman, a footnote in his own murder.

Also kind of ridiculous, because looking deeper into it, Lord Byron wrote "Fragment of a Novel" which seems to be credited as the first vampire themed English literature, though he never finished it.

So literally the competition produced the Vampire and Frankenstein theme in English horror. It's more interesting to me that a bunch of writers played a little game and basically invented so much.

Tbf, beating Lord Byron at things was a common pastime for women in his life. See also, his daughter Ada Lovelace, the mother of computer programming.

The OP does not suggest that John Polidori was her husband. There's a comma between "her husband" and "John Polidori". And in fact the post seems to be correct (judging by Wiki):

In 1816—at the suggestion of Lord Byron—Mary, Percy, John Polidori and Byron himself, each agreed to try writing a ghost story

I think that was just poor grammar, seems like "her husband" and John Polidori are two separate characters in the statement not that John Polidori was an elaboration of what her husband's name was. But that's how I read it initially too.

Yup. She did write a lot, mind you, but not really to be published. Her father ran a publishing house and I think she wrote a childrens verse for him when she was a kid but otherwise it was journals and imaginative stuff as a kid. The first thing she properly wrote was, indeed, Frankenstein. If memory serves.