The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
Posted on: January 5, 2019
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book left me dissatisfied but I’m in a mood to be generous and award it five stars for lucidity, readability and the fact that it provoked me to try and express my feelings about it in this review.
It is not new to go “In Search Of” a towering literary figure. I have at least one other “In Search Of” biography in this very room with me right now. But it is nevertheless exceedingly apt, apt with a poet’s precision, to be In Search of Mary Shelley. And Fiona Sampson is a poet who writes with extraordinary attention to detail, gleaning everything she can from every surviving sentence of Mary Shelley’s novels, journals and letters, and those of her friends, so the book actually lives up to its title. Fiona Sampson is, for sure, a woman in search of Mary Shelley, and she is searching for her very conscientiously in the enduring and compelling words that Mary Shelley wrote.
And I really sympathise with that search. I share it. I have been searching for a while. I am searching more than ever now after finishing this tantalising book.
For Mary Shelley is elusive. She is, still, in a way, anonymous. She hides behind precise and evocative language. She defies even the modern magnifying lens of scholarly scrutiny. Some carping critics are still not entirely decided, as they were undecided at the time, how much of Frankenstein she wrote. Or, indeed, who wrote which entry in the shared journal that she kept with that young firebrand she ran off with.
Fiona Sampson believes, I think, in what she calls evidence-based biography. So she looks hard at the evidence. But then she believes in adding a little bit of conjecture, even fantasy, wild surmise, guesswork, interpretation and opinion.
I like her for that. It’s done tactfully and respectfully. Her opinions are very interesting and plausible. And while I was imbibing them I started to form opinions of my own. You can read many things into some of Mary Shelley’s letters. Her omissions, too, are suggestive. Her motives in many key moments of her life are open to question.
It is not that she is duplicitous. Not at all. She is, I think, courageously open, principled and bold. But she is also very shy, very private, very modest. She shuns the limelight. She draws a veil over many things, even in her private journal.
But she isn’t afraid of anything and she throws herself into a passionate life with the man she loves and does right by him all the time that he is alive and all the long years following his death.
I have the most devoted and indelible respect for Mary Shelley. I have always been fascinated by her, ever since, many years ago, I first opened a book of poems written by Percy Bysshe, which was based on Mary Shelley’s two editions of 1839. (This was Thomas Hutchinson’s Oxford University Press edition of 1919.) She writes captivating vignettes about their life together between those poems. They are like miniature biographical essays, all the more moving for the fact that she was forbidden to write a biography of her husband by her father-in-law, on whom she depended for the education of her son. You can tell she adored her husband and cherishes his memory. But she is also very sensitive, respectful and objective. This is very moving. She honours him by staying true to his intentions, in spite of the obvious pain it must give her, reading back many of those lines.
But it is very hard, actually impossible, to discover what she was really thinking most of the time. Normally you can discover a writer’s true spirit through her works. But I even wonder how much of her novels and stories were as heartfelt and sincere as they might have been had she not felt so bereft, felt so deserted, betrayed even, by her friends and family.
Fiona Sampson’s intense, slim volume, does much to illuminate some of the dark corners of Mary’s life. But it is inviting rather than revelatory. She shines her torch and says, “Look, here is something fascinating … ” but she doesn’t rummage or despoil.
Go and read the letters. Read the journals and novels and biographical notes. What do you make of them?
Who was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, really? Was her literary life, “the last stuttering of the revolutionary spark that her mother Mary Wollstonecraft ignited?”
I don’t know. But I am grateful to Fiona Sampson for making me feel much wiser than I was 10 days ago.
intense sensations 
Do you have something to get off your chest?