In her 1831 introduction to the third edition of “Frankenstein,” the Gothic masterpiece she wrote when she was only 19, Mary Shelley tries to answer the question “frequently asked” by her readers: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?” She goes on to recall the by-now-legendary circumstances of its conception: Mary and her lover (later husband) the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, while staying at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and his doctor, John Polidori, were drawn one rainy night into a competition to see who could write the most terrifying ghost story—a contest Mary surely won hands down with her tale of an overreaching scientist and his uncontrollable creature. But the 34 year old, looking back, neatly sidesteps what we really want to know: How exactly did this inexperienced teenager, who had never published anything before, manage to create the most enduring horror story of all time? How did someone so apparently sheltered conjure a literary archetype that speaks with visceral directness, as Shelley herself saw, “to the mysterious fears of our nature”? And why, having launched herself on what promised to be a triumphant writing career, did she never match that first success again?
By the time of Mary Shelley’s death in 1851 at age 53, she’d been widowed for three decades, having devoted herself to editing her late husband’s verse and prose while raising their only surviving child. Her own later works—including five further, rather pedestrian novels and some worthy but dull historical and travel writing—had met with mixed reviews. Yet the fame of “Frankenstein” simply grew, persisting well beyond her lifetime, until its reputation eclipsed her own. Until the mid-20th century, critics have tended to see Mary Shelley as a one-book wonder.
Her resurrection as a subject for serious intellectual inquiry began with Muriel Spark’s spirited 1951 biography of the author—and even then, sympathetic as Spark was to Mary’s overall creative development, her most famous work was treated as the byproduct of an immature intelligence. “Frankenstein” was wonderful, declared Spark, in a verdict that has proved hard to shake, “not despite Mary’s youth, but because of it. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s best novel, because at that age she was not yet well acquainted with her own mind.”
Subsequent biographies have been of two types: those, like Anne K. Mellor’s carefully considered “Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters” (1988) and Miranda Seymour’s stunningly comprehensive “Mary Shelley” (2000), which try hard to rouse our enthusiasm for Mary’s output post- “Frankenstein,” and others, like Daisy Hay’s racy “Young Romantics” (2010), that regard the period marking the start of Mary’s career as a writer, which also happens to feature her sensational elopement with Percy Shelley, as the most vital. British poet and academic Fiona Sampson’s new study “In Search of Mary Shelley,” focusing almost exclusively on her subject’s youth, belongs squarely in the second camp.
In Search of Mary Shelley
By Fiona Sampson
Pegasus, 304 pages, $28.95
Ms. Sampson maintains that “the later years of a life—of anyone’s life—do not build a personality, and they don’t go on to affect a future,” but this is just window dressing. She wants to tell us about what she calls the “chewy” bits—the sex scandals, the haunted nights in Swiss villas, the Sturm und Drang. And she does it in a way that is unapologetically selective, giving us her Mary in a series of “freeze frames” or tableaux: biography by lightning flashes. Anyone who is looking for a balanced account of Mary Shelley’s troubled life should begin with Ms. Mellor or Ms. Seymour. If you are after bravura scene-setting, however, and an ardent inhabiting of the book’s subject, Ms. Sampson can’t be bettered.
Ms. Sampson throws herself wholeheartedly into satisfying our curiosity about the psychological triggers behind “Frankenstein.” Little of what she says is new, but the way in which it is presented is hair-raisingly immediate. “Frankenstein” offers us a chilling picture of the horrors of birth and the failure of youthful ideals, and by the time she came to write it, Mary was already painfully familiar with the first and was rapidly becoming acquainted with the second.
Her parents were William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher, and the trail-blazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792). Within 11 days of Mary’s birth in London in 1797, however, Wollstonecraft lay dead of puerperal fever, leaving Godwin on his own to raise the new baby and her half-sister, Fanny (Wollstonecraft’s daughter by a previous lover). Ms. Sampson gives full weight to the effect of this bereavement on Mary, who would go on to lose four of her own five children and for whom gestation and childbirth became sources of torment. She began “Frankenstein” after being delivered the previous year of a premature infant who did not survive, and only five months after the birth of her eldest son, William. Her writing of the book coincided with a third pregnancy, during which she must have been plagued by fears. They course through her agonized description of Victor Frankenstein’s struggle to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” and when we read that at last “a convulsive motion agitated its limbs,” it’s hard not to agree with Ms. Sampson that the detail seems “better suited to a deathbed than to a birth.”
The Founding Myth of the Scientific Age
Like its 8-foot creature, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” has had long legs since its publication 200 years ago. She deemed it a mere “ghost story,” but it has since been rebranded as the first science-fiction novel and even “the first modern myth,” according to the foreword of “The New Annotated Frankenstein” (Liveright, 352 pages, $35), edited by Leslie S. Klinger. That laurel, I would argue, belongs to Goethe’s 1808 “Faust, Part One,” but in this volume’s afterword, Anne K. Mellor makes a more defensible claim: that Frankenstein is “the myth of modern science,” illustrating how humanity’s attempts to harness nature can have unintended and horrific consequences.
Indeed, the novel is more relevant than ever, given the scientific advances in biotechnology and artificial intelligence that make Victor Frankenstein’s aim of creating a new species more than conceivable. “Frankenfoods” made from genetically modified organisms are just shelves away from Franken Berry cereal. Both are signs of how universal Shelley’s myth has become.
There are manifold editions of the novel, more than 90 films with “Frankenstein” in the title, and innumerable Frankenstein tchotchkes to warm the heart and freeze the blood of children and adults alike. Partly a fable about the Industrial Revolution, “Frankenstein” itself has become a scholarly and commercial industry, and a host of electrifying new works has been issued to celebrate the bicentenary of its publication. Mr. Klinger’s volume is a wonderfully capacious introduction to the 1818 edition and its historical, literary and biographical contexts: As his annotations demonstrate, Shelley undercut this version’s starkly existentialist themes when she revised it in 1831. And subsequent interpreters would emphasize other aspects of her creation.
Christopher Frayling’s “Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years” (Reel Art Press, 208 pages, $39.95) is especially strong in its “visual celebration” of the iconography of Shelley’s creation. Half of the book’s glossy pages are devoted to evocative images, some published here for the first time. They illuminate the unusual byways the work has traveled in its mass-media incarnations. We see, for example, that Elsa Lanchester’s unforgettably bizarre hairstyle in “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) was inspired by the ancient Egyptian bust of Nefertiti, displayed prominently in Berlin during the 1920s. Mr. Frayling’s detailed cultural history of “Frankenstein,” which comprises the book’s other half, is no less illustrative of “a creation myth which works for today.”
Those seeking to delve further will find intelligent essays on the novel’s origins, appropriations and scientific relevance in “Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon,” edited by physicist Sidney Perkowitz and filmmaker Eddy von Mueller (Pegasus, 239 pages, $28.95). Bringing together the “two cultures” of art and science just as Shelley did in her novel, this collection also provides insights into this modern myth by those who have contributed to its expansion, such as John Logan, creator of the brilliant “Penny Dreadful” TV series. Kathryn Harkup’s “Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $27) lucidly illuminates Shelley’s investment in the rapidly expanding knowledge of chemistry, biology and electricity of her times, and reminds us of how “Frankenstein” helped inspire technological developments, such as the pacemaker.
The last words should be left to Nick Groom, whose introduction to “Frankenstein or ‘The Modern Prometheus’: The 1818 Text” (Oxford, 226 pages, $22.95) encapsulates the work’s many interpretations. He sees “Frankenstein” as, among other things, “a creation myth about the origin of stories.” This is precisely what modern myths do: open the world to new questions, rather than establish answers. They are truly generative, an apt term for a novel that queries a selfish inventor, his damaged creature and science’s threat to arrogate creation to itself.
—Mr. Saler is the author of “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality.”
If, as Anne Mellor pointed out, “Frankenstein” articulates, “perhaps for the first time in Western literature, the most powerfully felt anxieties of pregnancy,’” it also explores the catastrophic consequences of bad parenting. Godwin was a distant father, whose remarriage when Mary was 4 to a Mrs. Clairmont, a woman his daughter came to loathe, left Mary feeling sidelined. Ms. Sampson reveals that, as a teenager, Mary sometimes suffered from a mysteriously swollen arm: “rigid, and huge with bandages,” her limb resembled “a monstrous appendage stitched from some other body onto her own.” Mary’s self-disgust and her longing for parental love are channelled in the monster’s anguished plea to its creator for compassion and care—a plea that Victor Frankenstein rejects.
By the time her father’s glamorous young disciple, the budding poet Percy Shelley, appeared on the scene, Mary’s emotional isolation was extreme. She was 16; he was 21, the rebellious heir to a baronetcy, a self-proclaimed atheist and radical, and a proponent of free love. He was also married, with one child and another on the way, and when he and Mary eloped to Europe they left a chain of human wreckage behind them. The stigma attaching to the Godwins ruined the prospects of Mary’s half-sister Fanny, who took a fatal overdose of laudanum in October 1816. Two months later, Percy’s wife Harriet—pregnant, possibly by Percy, who had earlier invited her to join him and his lover abroad—drowned herself in the Serpentine.
Ms. Sampson is scathing about the hypochondriac, self-centered yet undeniably charismatic Percy, deftly anatomizing the predicament in which Mary found herself “of being simultaneously unable to reason with him yet duty-bound to protect his particular fragility.” His manic doggedness, always teetering on the brink of hysteria, went straight into her depiction of the obsessive Victor Frankenstein. After Harriet’s death they married and Mary, having failed to grasp her husband’s commitment to his free-love project, had to stand by while he pursued her own stepsister, Claire Clairmont (who was also, for a time, the mistress of Byron), and a string of other women.
Ms. Sampson doesn’t minimize Percy’s infidelities, depicting them as foully traumatic for Mary. The coldness in her which he later complained of reads like the byproduct of the numbing and settled depression from which she was suffering by her 20s. Ms. Sampson observes shrewdly that for the second Mrs. Shelley, “Percy has to mean a great, undying love or else the sacrifices she’s already made are pointless.” These sacrifices would eventually include the deaths of both her son William and daughter Clara, who fell victim, during successive disease-ridden summers in Italy in 1818 and 1819, to their father’s indefatigable need for travel and stimulation and his failure to get proper medical care for them when they fell ill.
There was worse to come. Mary was appalled to discover, after Percy’s own death by drowning in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, that his friends had been coached by him to believe that she had failed him as a wife “just as she was coached, eight years earlier, to believe that Harriet had failed him.” Ms. Sampson argues that Mary never understood “that her youthful decision to run away with Percy could be misread as self-indulgence rather than passionately held moral and political principle,” but this contention is belied by the guilty sympathy she would express for “poor Harriet, to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.”
Mary’s 29 years as a widow, in which she settled down to domesticity in England, earning her living by writing those solid but stodgy novels, are covered by Ms. Sampson in a single chapter and a coda. This tends to reinforce the notion, partly suggested by Mary’s own middle-aged romanticizing of Percy, that her marriage to him had been the central event of her existence. But there are other relationships apart from those with husbands or books by which to measure the success of a life. Though Mary Shelley never again produced anything to equal “Frankenstein,” which she referred to as “my hideous progeny,” she undoubtedly succeeded—as, arguably, none of the other adults around her ever did—in being a loving and committed parent to her actual flesh and blood, resolutely supporting the only son left to her, also called Percy, by her literary labors, scraping together the money to see him through school and university, and welcoming his wife into their family when he married. This quietly heroic achievement makes her no less a feminist than her mother.
—Ms. Lowry’s second novel, “Dark Water,” will be published this fall.