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In Search of Mary Shelley + Man As God: 'Frankenstein' Turns 200

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Fiona Sampson's "In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein"
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books...-1.3347529

EXCERPT: . . . Sampson, who is Mary’s staunch defender, insists that this girl was “ground down by the feckless Shelley gene”. Aged 16, unmarried and pregnant with the first of five children she will carry for him, she walks 700 miles from France to Switzerland to set up home with her lover and her stepsister, who occupies far too much of his attention.

The Mary who endures is Mary Shelley the writer, whose literary fame eclipsed her husband’s for a time. As Sampson points out, “in an era when women have almost no opportunity to earn their own keep, without her husband she faces financial ruin, or at best dependency on the whim of hostile in-laws”. Although her father-in-law forbids her from using the Shelley name, or documenting any aspect of his son’s life, she succeeds as “a literary freelancer”. It is Lord Byron, her unlikely champion, who treats her as an intellectual equal and sends literary work her way, helping her to support her son through university. She ends her days in poor health, living in the house where [Percy] Shelley was born.

Sampson includes a fascinating exploration of Mary’s sexuality. She enjoyed relationships, some of them serious, after her husband’s death, and she exchanged intimate letters with several women. “Where Mary stands on the spectrum of sexual orientation may not be entirely clear, even to herself,” Sampson concludes....

MORE: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books...-1.3347529



Man As God: 'Frankenstein' Turns 200
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/0...-turns-200

EXCERPT: In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Nature: "A man is a god in ruins." [...] In 1818, Mary Shelley published the first edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a novel that has captured our collective imagination like few others in history. The genesis of the tale is well known, a ghost-story writing competition between Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe, and Lord Byron, during a stormy night on June 1816 on Lake Geneva. There have been more than 300 editions of the novel and at least 90 films, apart from hundreds of comic books and academic books inspired by it.

[...] Death seemed to curse Mary Shelley. On March 6, 1815, when she was only 17, she lost her premature baby daughter, born a few weeks early. Visions of the dead baby haunted her for months thereafter. In a dream, Shelley saw her dead daughter brought back to life after being rubbed vigorously in front of a fire. In Frankenstein, vigorous rubbing is changed to electricity and the flow of electric currents through the human body.

Shelley was aware of the experiments by Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta on the connection between electricity and muscular motion. She captured the cutting-edge science of her time and transformed it into a cautionary tale of the relationship between science and power....

MORE: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/0...-turns-200
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