A book coming out next month,
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein
, by independent scholar John Lauritsen, argues that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein. Instead, Lauritsen argues, the credit should go to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Why? For one, Lauritsen suggests Mary was too young and inexperienced as a writer to have penned a classic like Frankenstein. (She was nineteen at the time.) Lauritsen also suggests that the language of Frankenstein sounds like something Percy would have written. The
Sunday Times reports:
He says some of the language, with lines such as "I will glut the maw of death", were pure Shelley, and that the young aristocrat wrote a handful of fashionable horror tales that echo the later tone of Frankenstein. Lauritsen said Shelley had many reasons to disguise his authorship, including hints of "free love" that had already driven him out of England and an undertone of "Romantic, but I would not say gay, male love". Another factor may have been the critics, who hated it. The Quarterly Review of 1818 said the story of Frankenstein, the Swiss scientist who creates a monster from body parts, only to see it run amok, was a "tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity".
Most literary critics aren't buying Lauritsen's argument. Germaine Greer,
writing in The Guardian, argues that Mary Shelley must have written Frankenstein because a) the book is actually pretty badly written, as one would expect from a 19-year-old, and b) the underlying theme of the book is a very feminine one:
"The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster... Percy was capable perhaps of imagining such a nightmare, but it is the novel's blindness to its underlying theme that provides the strongest evidence that the spinner of the tale is a woman. It is not until the end of the novel that the monster can describe himself as an abortion. If women's attraction to the gothic genre is explained by the opportunity it offers for the embodiment of the amoral female subconscious, Frankenstein is the ultimate expression of the female gothic."
I'm inclined to believe that Mary Shelley is the true author of Frankenstein. But it is an interesting question to think about.
Comments
However, the argument that she had to have written it because the underlying theme is a feminine one is weak. Percy Bysshe Shelley was not exactly a manly man if you know what I mean. Besides the "underlying theme" can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways that could be applied to both male and female psyches.
I think she wrote it.
And it is already a well known literary fact that Percy rewrote and edited the book extensively, so the whole "it reads like his work" is pretty much a useless argument.
Dorothy Hewitt had her first book of poems published aged 19.
Tillie Olsen and Nina Bouraoui both began their first novels aged nineteen.
I think Mr. Lauritsen is projecting his own teenage inadequacy a wee bit.
I suppose it's also important to note that she wrote additional books.
it reminds of the guy who said that Shakespeare couldnt have written his plays, because he was too common
People point out her age because they think it's at odds with the language and subject matter, and they suspect Percy's hand because of the language but mostly because practically no one remembers anything she wrote after he died.