Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein
Mary Shelley once said, “If philosophical novels were in fashion, we conceive an excellent one might be written on the development of the same mind in various stations, in different periods of the world’s history.” Anna Trevor, a young, American woman has the kind of consciousness Mary Shelley must have foreseen. During waking hours Anna is preparing a controversial paper on Frankenstein. When she sleeps, she falls into alarmingly realistic dreams, meeting Mary and learning the truth behind many of the famous episodes in her life.In England, where Anna has come to present her paper, coincidence and synchronicity abound. While staying with her distant cousin, Rose, she learns a fragile, ancestral tie connects her to the Shelleys. She travels south with Rose’s son, Taylor, to meet “Auntie” Francis, a ninety-four-year-old spinster who claims to have been intimate in her youth with remnants of the Shelley family. The reclusive mistress of Manesbrook Manor speaks of writings never made available to scholars. Manesbrook Manor is as eccentric as its mistress, with a cellar that has been sealed for three quarters of a century. When Taylor’s charismatic brother-in-law Peter arrives, Anna’s dreams spill over into her waking state, suggesting they are more than archeological expeditions into a distant past. Anna begins to believe Mary and her legendary lovers, the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, actually exist as consciously creative beings sharing time and space—and mind—with her.
Are Anna’s dreams active, transformative, “real” experiences capable of influencing both the present and the past; capable of healing the wounded imaginations of all concerned? Is this a ghost story? An historical fiction? A tale of mystical encounters in a state of consciousness where all time is present time? Requiem offers an impeccably researched portrait of the brilliance and daring of the author of Frankenstein. It is a tribute, a 'philosophical novel' that seeks to embrace the zeitgeist of Mary Shelley’s day, a symbolic recovery of the creative genius of the feminine. Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein is literary fiction that, like its namesake, rides the thin edge between the rational and the irrational, transporting its readers into the 19th century world of Britain's famed Romantics.
A Word About Place
Molly traveled to England, Italy, Switzerland, and France researching Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein. Her novel emerged out of the land, the architecture, and the artifacts of the past.
"I did a lot of traveling and spent a lot of time creating the world my novel lives in. The most consistent feedback I’ve received from readers is that reading Requiem is like falling into another world. I believe stories like Mary Shelley’s live in the earth, that they can be mined out of the energies that surround the places where she spent time—like a psychic residue, a collective memory. I believe we all leave a trail behind us, but that the bigger the person’s impact, the more potent the trail. I came to know Mary by spending time in the remnants of her world.
My settings, even for the contemporary character Anna, are all based on real places that I found in my travels and real experiences I had in those places. For example, the old estate with its cellar that’s been sealed for three quarters of a century—there is such a place in England, a B&B where I stayed. The place felt haunted and I had a peculiar experience that led to a conversation with the owners. They were not surprised. They believed the place was haunted, and were, I think, a little afraid of their own cellar. In Requiem, this becomes Manesbrook Manor, Auntie Frances’s abandoned B&B and a doorway to much of Anna's contact with the past."
Manesbrook Manor
