The common story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein
is that she conceived the plot during a ghost-writing contest while she, her lover
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her sister Claire were staying at the manor house of
Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori. Some might add that she
took inspiration from an experiment in galvanism she had witnessed a few weeks
earlier. But Lita Judge’s evocative book,
told through prose poetry, posits that the novel grew for many years within Mary’s
mind, sewn together from the tragedies and drama of her life. It grew from the deaths
that surrounded her: her children; her neglected sister; Percy Shelley’s
abandoned first wife; and Mary’s own mother who died giving birth to her. It
grew from her feelings of estrangement towards her once-beloved father who did
not approve of her romance with the young poet.
It grew from the anger of her sister Fanny “shackled by illegitimacy and
despair”. And it grew from Percy Shelley’s own growing madness “because society
loathes him for his beliefs”. Out of these parts Mary made her creation, so
Judge writes, stitching them into a greater whole just as Victor Frankenstein
assembled his creature from corpses.
The book is told in first person from Mary’s perspective,
giving the reader a personal connection with her pain and her joy. At critical
moments the voice of her creature also emerges as an extension of her. A literary
child just as precious to her as the biological children she lost.
Central to Mary’s story is her turbulent relationship with
Percy Bysshe Shelley. How they came to love each other and fled to Europe to
try to build a life through loss, ostracization, and Shelley’s growing mania. Equally
important to the narrative is Mary’s relationship with her sister Claire, who travels
with the couple and shares in Mary’s pain and joy. And, then, of course the book
depicts the fateful ghost-writing contest at Byron’s chateau, when Mary’s
creature finally comes to life and speaks with his own voice.
The book gives context to some of the more macabre events in
Mary’s life, such as when she first makes love to Shelley on her mother’s
grave, or how she rescues his physical heart after he is cremated and keeps it
in her writing desk for the rest of her life. Both acts keep her deceased loved
ones close to her.
Judge’s evocative black-and-white illustrations accompany
and enhance each poem, steeping the book in a gothic aesthetic. This is a passion
project for the author, undertaken- as she explains in the afterward- while she
struggled with pain, fatigue, and isolation during a long illness. “I have
represented the details of Mary’s life,” she writes, “by weaving the actual
events (as documented in her journals, copious letters, and later biographies)
with the themes she and Shelley wrote about in their creative work.” The author
does acknowledge that, although this book draws from facts, it is a dramatization
of Mary’s experiences. Judge provides an
extensive bibliography for further reading, along with a list of what the
characters themselves read, to provide some context for their lives. She also includes
short biographical notes of what happened to everyone later in life.
