Frankenstein

INTRODUCTION

Eleven days after the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the women's rights advocate and philosopher, died. If this does not spark in a child a curiosity as to what makes a body hold on to the light: the 'gnosis' (the elusive essence of a human that renders them - alive, not just functioning approximations of bone and brain and bodily organs), then I do not know what else might.

I believe it is that moment, more than any other, that sparked a lifelong consideration of the 'creator of all things' - one who had such power to extinguish and no longer bring back to life any creature - in Mary Shelley.

Could there be no way of communicating with such a merciless creator that there's a considerable outcome to such an event in a child's life? No science to alter nature's brutality? No strike of lightning that might alter the trajectory of permanent consequence! Of course, as an infant this is at first unknown, and she has a father to look in on her.

William Godwin, journalist and political philosopher, is one who accepts such a penance in loss, and while he may have tried to not link his daughter's life with the loss of his wife, his strong lack of emotional connection to Mary - no matter her efforts - perhaps indicates otherwise. Godwin may have considered this situation be assuaged a touch at least by his child growing up to have an uncompromisingly brilliant mind, one that hopefully reflects his own considerations somewhat. This is absolutely what he expected.

Mary cherished all news of a mother she would never meet. She was not deterred by supposedly scandalous indiscretions. A detested stepmother sits in the wings in her later childhood and then at the table of her father for the rest of her life (Godwin married his neighbour Jane, an apparently less friendly presence who openly preferred her own children to the more wildly raised Mary). Her father was often in debt, sometimes perilously so. That constant pressure from the creator, of a creation that may destroy him (financially and later in self-esteem) was his payment for absolute devotion to the development of his own mind, to philosophy. His daughter witnessed this creator in her father, and the endless worry such diligent commitment brought financially to their family.

When Mary is fifteen she meets an admirer of her father's philosophical theories, the twenty-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is married, although recently separated from his wife. Shelley promises to pay off her father's debts. He idolises Godwin's mind. Mary begins to meet Percy in secret at her mother's grave.

The impact of their collision is unquestionable.

Soon enough the newly infatuated couple set off travelling, away from the ardent disapproval of her father. On returning to London several years later, she has already had to endure the aftermath of having lost their premature first-born daughter and the suicide of Shelley's wife, Harriet Westbrook. I cannot imagine how the teenager marrying her new husband a short time later, already felt. Or how many times she had to consider, in the most direct and unchangeable and helpless manner, not just the meaning of existence, but also the absolute finite nature of human life. Both a life she had created and the life that had created her, gone so soon.

The young Mary, who, along with her stepsister, Clara Clairmont (or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known), joined Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Shelley for a summer in Switzerland, where a challenge was laid out by Byron that they all think up a ghost story, was no ordinary teenage girl.

Despite Mary's not insubstantial trials, she had grown up in a household rich in thought, listening to and taking part in conversations on philosophy, literature, sciences, arts and humanities. Nobody could have had any intimation of what she was still yet to face later in life. Mary was yet to experience the loss of two more of their children, and she'd also go through the untimely death of her husband; he drowned in 1822, after his sailboat sank during a storm in Italy, a place they had hoped to make their home.

This is all before the last decade of her own life, spent unwell, eventually showing up as a brain tumour that had long been plaguing her and would see her out at fifty-three years old. The one steady relationship she did keep for the rest of her life was with her only remaining child: Percy Florence Shelley.

So, when Mary comes down for breakfast to a rainy morning in Switzerland, as it was for much of that summer - after many fretful nights in dread, where she feared she might never find anything to write about for this challenge - she walks in to the kitchen, pale, tired, dark-eyed, having tossed and turned all night with a new and irrepressible inspiration and she quietly states that she has finally thought of an idea - for a story.

All I can ever think, with rapturous glee, knowing what she is about to produce, is: yes, you have Mary Shelley; yes, you bloody well have!

It is said that Percy encouraged Mary to write, insisted she must. However, he also thought that he would be the one to decide if her work held any merit. He thought, with famous literary parents, she had to try, and that he should be the judge of those efforts.

'I've had an idea, I think, finally!'

I can almost see the silhouette as Byron looks at Percy, stoking the embers of last night's fire.

I wonder about that first pour of hot tea from a silver pot as she sits down, the crumbs on clean linen from toast, the early morning nuances of making one's way through breakfast and the egos of men (she was a staunch supporter, editor and promoter of Percy's work, taking great effort to publish and champion him). Of course, she would have felt cauterised in thought, unable to bring to the week's writing any idea of worth with these already established writers' eyes upon her, waiting to inspect what she might bring.

What is true to say of this young woman - as she smoothed down her hair, lifted off the lid from the butter - was at that age of nineteen, she had already lived, and lost, and had to challenge her own being in ways that I believe influenced her far more profoundly than any of the writers she ever met, including either of the men in the room.

Mary was a child who arrived so close before her own mother's demise, but what did such a girl really understand of monsters? Of creators? Of the uncontrollable consequences of certain creations? I think she understood far more than most.

Perhaps there was plum jam and birdsong that morning. Was she already turning over precise visions and lines as the formations of Frankenstein began to etch themselves in her mind! All of this before history - who is also about to attend this breakfast with all the insistent voices clamouring to state that Mary and her 'story' can only be accurately considered in sentences if they are punctuated often and pointedly about the influences of Shelley, Bryon and of course Coleridge (a regular visitor at her childhood home), and Godwin, too, her father, who published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), a homage to her mother that also exposed her affairs and illegitimate child.

In this introduction I shall not engage overtly with the academic readings of Mary Shelley's influences as they are often outsourced as the main influences on her in Frankenstein, and, of course, other books do have bearing, but what I am truly interested in is Mary and her creation. The other influences interest me far less than Mary herself, and so I am going to focus on her and the world she created in Frankenstein. I acknowledge a great many academics would not be ringing the doorbell to this breakfast parlour, even when she may have just thought of the most amazing opening line. Never mind all that, they'd just bolt on through in their hundreds to tell Mary who, or why, or how, or which book had influenced her most, whose mind, whose life, whose love, whose conversation! Scarcely would they truly consider this young woman, who has already lost both her mother and a child, as someone whose real-life interest in the 'life force', in the 'monster' of 'creation' held roots that were solely embedded in her own heart, mind and soul in ways a great many who came waving their academic theories after her, might never comprehend.

Without Mary Shelley's personal history and tragedies, combined with the absolute strength she exhibited in always moving forward, no matter what she faced in this life, these would not have been the obsessions she explored, and we would never have encountered her creation of Frankenstein, and certainly not one of such grotesque, humanist, delicate wonder.

I arrive humbly before this formidable writer, this exquisite largely unrivalled talent, this woman who is to become a master of the scalpel of the written word, one who was a child of limitless imagination, in many ways, to deal with her own monsters. I come to her as one who cares first for the origins of a writer, of their personal story - just as important - not some footnote to what they read before; I come slightly obsessed with the exact moments in time where circumstances meet theory, where personal reading collides with unbearable truths. I come looking for what it is in Mary Shelley that converged to create a work of such influence and utter brilliance.

It is not that she is a teenager at...