Tiffany O'Callaghan, Opinion editor
Like all great stories, Frankenstein has been reborn many times (Image: Alastair Muir/Rex Features)
In The Lady and Her Monsters, Roseanne Montillo explores the often macabre historical backdrop to Mary Shelley's famous tale
THE wind howled outside the house near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where Mary Godwin, her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and others were on holiday in May 1816. Inside, the story of Frankenstein was taking shape as the friends tried their hand at writing scary stories.
But as Roseanne Montillo says in The Lady and Her Monsters, it wasn't simply literary rivalry that spawned the tale. She makes a compelling case for other strong influences shaping this famous fable of science gone awry.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer and women's rights advocate, and William Godwin, the philosopher and novelist. In part, her literary pedigree is what attracted her husband-to-be. And it is no accident, Montillo says, that the Victor Frankenstein character had much in common with Percy, who was known for his love of the ghoulish and for his unruly experiments, with noxious smells often escaping from his room at University College, Oxford.
As well as the people in her life, broader changes in Georgian Britain influenced Mary Shelley. Montillo delves into the growing use of cadavers in medical education, and the trafficking in corpses stolen from fresh graves. Mary Shelley would have known about this, and of the raucous public hangings - some not far from her London home. She would have known, too, that the corpses of criminals were used in dissection, and, occasionally, in attempts to reanimate the dead.
Yet in tracing these influences, Montillo never loses sight of the fact that it was Mary Shelley's imagination that sewed the pieces together - and provided the vital spark that keeps the tale alive nearly two centuries on.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Frankenstein lives!"
Book information
The Lady and Her Monsters: A tale of dissections, real-life Dr Frankensteins and the creation of Mary Shelley's masterpiece by Roseanne Montillo
William Morrow
$26.99
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