To the Editor:

I read with interest Robert McCrum's review of "Shelley's Heart," by Charles McCarry (June 25). I agree with Mr. McCrum's statement that the novel's title demands explanation, but he neglected to mention the well-documented story of Percy Bysshe Shelley's actual heart.

After Shelley's death by drowning, his body was cremated in the presence of his friends Edward Trelawny and Leigh Hunt. Strangely, Shelley's heart did not burn and was retrieved from the fire by Trelawny, who gave the heart to Hunt, who ultimately gave it to Shelley's wife, Mary. The heart was finally buried in 1889, 67 years after Shelley's death, with the body of his son Sir Percy Florence Shelley. In a 1955 article in The Journal of the History of Medicine, Arthur Norman suggested that Shelley may have suffered from "a progressively calcifying heart . . . which indeed would have resisted cremation as readily as a skull, a jaw or fragments of bone." ALEXA SELPH Atlanta