Three novelists reimagine Mary Shelley’s life and loves and her most famous creation.
,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future—that of queer literary criticism. “Do not start. Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”
Though sexual relationships between women were not criminalized, women whose romantic inclinations defied the heterosexual standard generally faced a choice between repressing their desires and living as outcasts. Was Mary Shelley herself such a woman? The Dutch novelist Anne Eekhout suggests as much in “” , a reimagining of both Mary’s early life and the period during which she wrote her famous novel.
In her preface to “Frankenstein,” Shelley writes of hearing Percy and Byron discuss the experiments of Erasmus Darwin , who is said to have observed a microbe spontaneously coming to life. Eekhout represents the potentially sinister powers of science in the figure of David Booth, a mysterious older man married to Isabella’s sister, Margaret. Booth speaks about seeing a physicist use electricity to reanimate the corpse of a criminal.
After these tragedies, Shelley developed an intense friendship with Jane Williams, the widow of a friend who had drowned with Percy. Recalling these years in a letter to a friend in 1835, Shelley confessed that, after Percy died, she was “ready to give myself away—and being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women” .
Like Eekhout, McGill is concerned with questions about what is natural or normal and what is not—and the conservatism and arbitrariness with which such distinctions are made. The novel’s protagonist is motivated by her sense of herself as an unnatural creature. Her world has no language for a female scientist: as McGill points out in a postscript, the term at the time was “man of science.
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