This is the story of Mary Shelley. And what a story it is.

It’s no wonder that she wrote Frankenstein, with a life like this. The book starts with her father, William Godwin, who held gatherings at his home in which men discussed topics such as the existence of God, which Mary’s stepmother, Jane Clairmont, disapproved of young girls listening to. Mary, however, listens in one night with her sister, to Coleridge reading his famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with it’s spooky overtones, and it clearly made an impression, the author suggests, since Mary later used the imagery in her own novel.

The author has a lot of fun drawing connections between Mary’s life experiences and the imagery in Frankenstein: the lightening storm the night she was born; the death of her mother – the famous Mary Wollstonecraft – in childbirth.¹

So many things happened to Mary Shelley to make Frankenstein. Her mother’s death, Franklyn’s lightning experiments, the advent of anatomical dissections of human cadavers, women intellectuals, the attempted reanimation of corpses through galvanism, severed heads from the guillotine reputedly blinking and grimacing, their lips moving soundlessly. The study of alchemy asked if life could be created without a soul. The scientific experiments – galvanism and lightning again – of Mary Shelley’s husband.

And everywhere, ideas were published in books, in newspapers, in pamphlets – and talked about amongst intellectual circles. Ideas flowing like wine, intoxicating artists and writers and scientists, and intellectuals. The daughter of a bluestocking and a free thinker, Mary had access to all these ideas and they all came together – with her own stormy emotions – in her head one rainy vacation abroad.

The back of the book states that this story is told “with the verve and ghoulish fun of a Tim Burton film” and, yes, to some extent. But it also reminds me a little of that film, Poor Things, a film I liked for the visual imagery, although I found DeFoe’s character troubling.² A woman, liberated when women were not, is brought up with access to experiments with cutting edge science that should perhaps be prohibited, and with access to cutting edge ideas – who gallivants about Europe with a libertine, taking in all that the world has to offer. (Although Mary Godwin was not as sexually liberated as Emma Stone’s character, and was definitely a lot more emotionally tortured³.)

There is so much in this book, I couldn’t hope to cover it all here. But it covers her life from the wooing of her parents to her death in the late 1800s, her marriage and eventual divorce, the publication of her book – under a male surname – the reaction when literary gatekeepers discovered that it had been written by a woman, how she spent the rest of her life, and finally her death.

It’s one of these lives where so many things happen – I think that’s the other reason it reminds me of Poor Things – just the scope of it all! This would make an awesome movie – but I do wish they would give it to a director who won’t make it too heavy and serious. I think of the approach that the movie Impromptu – about George Sand’s obsession for Frederick Chopin⁴ – took: there was so much flourishing then, that the only way the movie could tuck it all in was to do it with wit and humor and incredible casting.

To do justice to this story, you would need the same approach here.

A fun book to read and chock full of history.

1. Ironic, given her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The author reports that Wollstonecraft was attended by midwives who struggled and struggled and then, finally, suggested that Godwin should call a doctor. Doctors, in those days, were all male but had not yet, if I have my historical timing right, taken over childbirth. At this time, I believe, they were still basically surgeon-barbers. So to call one was basically saying there was nothing left to do for her. ↩︎
2. Which I think we were supposed to. ↩︎
3. That would have been interesting, wouldn’t it, given her husband’s own sexual habits. I wonder if he would have approved and suspect he would not have. Sauce for the gander not being good for the goose. ↩︎
4. If you have not seen Impromptu, add it to your list. Bernadette Peters plays a perfectly bitchy – and perpetually – countess who is dating Franz Liszt, and is a frenemy to Sand. Another character comments that Peters’ character is bitchy to Sand because she’s jealous that Sand was having an affair with the better composer. ↩︎