So, Who Really Wrote Frankenstein?

I found an article this morning, from the Daily Telegraph in England, about a new book on Frankenstein. It’s written by a professor from the University of Deleware, Charles Robinson, one of the foremost experts on Mary Shelley in the US. His new book, The Original Frankenstein—which will be out in October—is arguing that Percy Bysshe Shelley played such a significant role in the writing of Frankenstein that the authorship should be listed as “Mary Shelley with Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Robinson says he’s identified some 5000 changes made to Mary Shelley’s manuscript by Shelley before it was published.

Robinson studied the hand-writen text at the Bodleian in Oxford, not something I had access too, although I did study the facsimiles, the photocopied versions of their writings. He also believes they wrote together in bed, using the same pen—which must mean that some kind of technology has been used to determine the instrument that penned the words. That would make a great scene—I wish I had written it! There is a hint of such shared writing in Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, when Shelley and Mary are in Paris (before Frankenstein was written).

It’s also worth noting, however, that Mary worked on Frankenstein over the winter of 1816-1817, while she was living in Bath, mostly without Shelley. Mary was holed up near a very pregnant Claire Claremont (Mary’s stepsister), who was carrying Lord Byron’s child. Both women were staying out of sight; Bath was a place where it was easier to do so. This was the Bath of Jane Austen’s day, the very social city where the rich went to play. “A safer choice than London—for although the marriage market was drifting toward Brighton, Bath was still a city of young women looking for husbands, and young men looking for wives. Bath was exactly what was needed: a very good place to slip quietly into anonymity.”

Here’s a quote from, “This So Unhappy Enterprise,” Chapter 38 of Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein. It tracks the events in Bath that winter. This particular quote is taken from the night Mary learns her half-sister, Fanny, has committed suicide:

Mary had been sitting at her writing desk for hours. Willie had nursed and been put down. Elise was sleeping soundly. She looked at the timepiece that lay on the desk. It was well after one in the morning. Shelley had been gone since noon. Surely he could not be much longer, surely he would begin to think of her worrying, of the confusion it must be engendering that she had not been home to receive a kiss of warm reassurance, surely he would think of his lonely Pesksie, would he not?

She stared at the notebook, looking again where Shelley’s words were written, studying them carefully, as she had dozens of times already this evening. Just before he left, he had been reading her story, marking out words, making changes, leaving notes in the left-hand margin as her father had taught her, commenting on the text.

Her story was much expanded since Switzerland. To her amazement, it was taking on entirely new elements of complexity, becoming, as he insisted it was, a novel. She turned several pages, thinking that perhaps the nature of her story was to blame for her strange sense of unease. Maybe she was more like Victor Frankenstein than she cared to admit. What had Byron said, about fiction begetting fact? This was not a story she wanted to see unfold in any sense of the word. Feeling a vague sense of agitation, she turned back to the manuscript and yet again read Shelley’s parting comment.

“O you pretty Peskie!” It was meant to make her smile. Why couldn’t she?

Beside the note he had corrected the spelling of the word enigmatic. He found her inability to spell quaint. She thought it was because she’d learned so little Latin when she was young, and felt embarrassed. Latin seemed the missing structure, the context, as it were, for comprehending language. And she was finally learning it with Shelley’s assistance, although the focus of her study had shifted since beginning her story.

Now what little time she stole with Shelley, who was mostly in London, was spent walking along the Avon, talking, or reading Milton. She loved to listen to his animated voice as he read to her. Shelley was convinced her story—born in Diodati, Milton’s Diodati—was a modern tale of lost innocence, lost paradise. He encouraged her to think in such mythic terms. “A tale that goes beyond the personal and stretches into the universal.”

Mary thought it was somehow comparable to the Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, and when she said that, Shelley excitedly agreed. “Absolutely. Myth, allegory, parable. A story Victor must tell, and with the same horror as the ancient mariner tells his.”

She was writing daily, describing the creature’s plight. He was not dumb, rather capable of thought and eager to understand his world, but abandoned by his creator, shunned by all who saw him because he was so frightening. He had become enraged. His last hope for home and happiness had just ended in rejection, shattering whatever remnant of goodwill his soul seemed to harbor. He was on the prowl now, ready to do damage. She could feel it. Suddenly, there was a rattling at the door. It flew open; Shelley had finally returned.

“Shelley!” she scrambled up from her writing table and rushed toward him.

“Oh, Maië,” Shelley said, collapsing into her arms. “I could not find her, I—“

Holding to him tightly, Mary pulled back so as to see his face. As they stared at one another, a cold silence crept over Mary’s heart; she feared she understood, feared that, indeed, all evening she had been keeping something dark at bay.

“Couldn’t find her,” she said slowly. “Couldn’t find Fanny, you mean?”

It was during the writing of Frankenstein that Mary’s half-sister, Fanny, and Harriet, Shelley’s abandoned wife (pregnant again), both killed themselves. Fanny by taking laudanum; Harriet by drowning herself. Shelley spent much of the winter in London with Leigh Hunt. He was gone a great deal. There are dozens of letters from Mary complaining of that fact, begging him to come to her.

Charles Robinson, as I said, is one of the most highly respected names in the world of academia when it comes to research on Mary Shelley. I’m not arguing that he’s wrong in saying that there wasn’t a great deal of back and forth between the Mary and Shelley over Frankenstein. He’s not the first to claim it and obviously its absolutely true. Shelley was a huge influence on Mary. I’m just not convinced that Shelley should be listed as an author, “with” or otherwise, as Robinson suggests. That is, unless we’re also going to list editor, Gordon Lish, as an author alongside Raymond Carver. And maybe Lish should be—Carver’s wife is arguing that Lish’s heavy hand tampered with Carver’s work too much. I’m just saying the same standard must applied to both.

I also want to point out that when I began researching Mary Shelley, back in 1990, both Books in Print, and the UC Berkeley Library, where I did most of my early research, conflated Mary Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) with her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). They were shelved as one author, one woman. I don’t want to see Mary Shelley diminished. As I’ve argued in Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, I think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein makes a dramatic statement about the role of women, the enforced invisibility of 19th century women. And although I credit Shelley with some feminist understanding, I don’t believe he had the insight to say in Frankenstein, what Mary Shelley said about women and their experience—a theme I find central to the book.

Robinson’s research, it seems to me, must open up a whole discussion on nature of the author/editor relationship—what it should be, and how it should be credited. I would argue that Shelley was Mary’s editor in the same way that Gordon Lish was Raymond Carver’s. In fact, there are those who argue that Shelley’s influence, especially as he changed Mary’s more pedestrian language into flowery, poetic choices, was problematic—an interference.

And then there’s the fact that Mary Shelley influenced Shelley’s poetry. She was, afterall, the first person to collect, edit and publish his poetry after his death. Frankly, it irks me, that so few in the world of academia place any importance on that, or on Mary Shelley’s contribution to Thomas Moore’s biography of Lord Byron, to which she contributed liberally.

So, there you have it! The Original Frankenstein, got my attention. I’m looking forward to reading it.