The central premise of Charles Robinson's book -- a monumental fallacy -- is that words in Mary Shelley's handwriting were composed by her, and that the only words composed by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, are the ones in his handwriting. To puncture this particular fantasy: Mary routinely acted as scribe for Shelley, transcribing his rough manuscripts and taking dictation from him. She also acted as copyist for other writers, including Byron and Peacock. Therefore, words in her handwriting may well have been written by someone else.
In my book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (2007), I examine evidence -- both textual and extra-textual -- bearing on the authorship question. I conclude that every page of Frankenstein bears the signature of Shelley himself: his ideas and imagination, his phrases, his intensity, his mastery of English prose. In contrast, the prose that Mary Shelley really did write, all be herself, is embarrassingly bad; she could never have written Frankenstein.
It is time to raise Frankenstein to its deserved stature. It is a radical and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its true author, Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest poets in the English language.
Their Love is Alive
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It began as a game to pass the time while the rain fell and lightning struck. Visiting Switzerland in June 1816, a small group—young and rivalrous, amorous and ever so literary—agreed to a ghost-story-writing contest. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, could come up with nothing at first. Then she had a nightmare—a walking corpse, glimmering yellow eyes. It delighted her. The next day, she announced to the others that she had imagined a story. Frankenstein was born.
Two years later Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was published anonymously. Readers immediately wondered about the author's identity. Some guessed it was the poet Percy Shelley, who had written the novel's preface. Those who knew that the author was Percy's (by then) wife, Mary Shelley, were amazed. Mary later said that she was constantly asked how she, "then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" In an introduction to a revised 1831 edition, she told the Gothic tale of the ghost-story contest. (Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire, were the others present.) As for Percy, she "certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling" in the book, but she did depend upon his encouragement and more. "Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone."
The question of whether Mary alone wrote the novel, however, would not die. The answer matters, and not only because scholars who once regarded Frankenstein as merely a potboiler now consider it a progenitor of science fiction, a monument of Romantic literature, and a landmark text in gender studies. The answer matters because Frankenstein so beautifully explores the consequences of living and working in isolation. After cloistering himself to bring dead flesh to life, Victor Frankenstein condemns his creature to loneliness. The creature does the same to him in revenge. Solitude makes monsters of both.
Few people did more to promote the archetype of the independent Romantic hero than Percy Shelley. It turns out, though, that he was a conscientious helpmate. By examining Mary's original drafts, Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson identified Percy's contributions to Frankenstein and, in 1996, edited a reproduction of Mary's notebooks for scholarly audiences. Now he has published The Original Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley). The first part of the new book highlights Percy's edits and the second reveals Mary's lone voice. "The novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary Shelley," Robinson writes in his introduction, but he estimates that Percy wrote "at least" 4,000 to 5,000 words of the 72,000 total. Many of -Percy's fixes are minor. Some are good, some bad. Percy may have corrected Mary's parallel constructions, but he also mucked up her more straightforward language. "Smallness" became "minuteness." "I did not despair" became "I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed." Frankenstein was already turgid; Percy made it more so.
Yet he also helped with some of the novel's most moving lines: the monster's appeal to his creator for affection. "Remember that I am thy creature—Thy Adam—or rather the fallen angel for every where I see bliss while I alome [sic] am irrecoverably wretched," Mary had written. Percy altered it: "Remember that I am thy creature—I ought to be thy Adam—but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed; everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded." Percy grasped what lay beneath Mary's language and pulled it to the surface. "I ought to be thy Adam," the creature says—but his creator rejected him before his mate was made. He is not inhuman because he was brought to life on a surgical table. He is inhuman because he is alone.
Mary Shelley knew something about loneliness and abandonment. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died giving birth to her, and her stepmother was "a woman I shudder to think of," Mary wrote. At 16, Mary fell in love with Percy Shelley, an aristocrat by birth and atheist by declaration, a rebel at every chance. They ran off together. There was already a Mrs. Shelley: Harriet, mother of Percy's 2-year-old daughter and pregnant again.
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