Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page B

the hard-to-please Godwin. Taking cues from her father, Mary listened to Shelley’s discussions of radical politics and free love, and the pretty, auburn-haired daughter of the great philosopher captured the poet’s imagination as well. Convinced by Shelley that true love knew no law, determined to practice the unconventional social and artistic principles that had shaped her existence thus far, Mary left her father’s house a month before her seventeenth birthday. The couple lived on the road, and from hand to mouth. Neither set of parents approved of their union. They toured Europe, wrote daily, exchanged ideas with revolutionaries and progressive thinkers, and had two children within two years. They finally rested at Byron’s Villa Diodati in Switzerland for a few months in 1816.
    Mary’s adoration for Shelley knew no boundaries, and she clung to him tightly as he danced her through this breathless, passionate lifestyle. Her put her through many emotional trials as a less-than-faithful partner and less-than-caring father, but he also recognized her artistic potential and encouraged her to write. Energized by her declaration of independence from her father, inspired by Shelley’s faith in her ability, and eager to please him at all costs, Mary must have felt that much was at stake when she pledged to write a ghost story on the night of June 16 (a story she relates with some embellishment, but great flair, in the 1831 “Author’s Introduction” to Frankenstein). Her half-sister Claire, Shelley, Byron, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, had all agreed to do so as well, but Mary was the only one of the group who actually finished her tale. (Polidori ultimately incorporated Byron’s idea for his story in The Vampyre: A Tale [1819].) A discussion between Byron and Shelley on the “nature and principle of life” captured the young mother’s interest, and she began working on a story about a student who created a “hideous phantasm” of a human being. Shelley encouraged Mary to expand the tale, and with his assistance (plus the relatively stable home life they shared living in Marlow, England, in 1817), she completed her first novel and published it in January 1818.
    Four and a half years later, Mary’s personal and writing lives were irrevocably altered. Her final pregnancy ended in a near-fatal miscarriage in June 18 2 2; the next month, any hope of having another child with Shelley ended with his accidental and untimely death. The love of her life, as well as her creative inspiration and publishing liaison, was gone. Protracted negotiations with Sir Timothy, Shelley’s disapproving father, resulted in only a modest living allowance for her son, Percy. So Mary was forced to write for other reasons besides developing and fulfilling her aesthetic ideals. Indeed, many of her later works are notably less ambitious and innovative than Frankenstein. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830) is a three-volume historical fiction in the style of Sir Walter Scott, who made a small fortune as a novelist in the 1810s and 1820s. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are domestic fictions that recycle many of the conventions of that genre; in both novels, Mary reused literary techniques, such as flashbacks and multiple viewpoints, that she had more creatively employed in Frankenstein.
    That is not to say Frankenstein stands in Shelley’s canon as the only original and provocative work. The Last Man (1826), for example, caught the attention of early Shelleyan critics like Elizabeth Nitchie and Muriel Spark, and has been offered in several new editions since 1965. The novel’s theme is as monumental and ambitious as Frankenstein’s: the complete annihilation of the world’s population from the eyes of its single survivor, Lionel Verney. Mary wrestles with many of the themes of Frankenstein, including the disruptive nature of human desire and the psychological burden of family relationships. But The Last Man does not