I can't remember the first time I read Frankenstein - it was probably the classic comic book version when I was a young kid but it made an appropriate impression on me as something both terrifying and wonderful. I haven't read it in ages now but when I saw Veronica Bennett's Angelmonster I was very intrigued. Everyone has read Frankenstein or watched some movie version of it, but most of us know very little about the author. It's amazing though when you think that this book was written by a teenager - and a teenage girl at that (we are talking 1816 after all). From her note on the dustjacket, Bennett saw a portrait of Shelley and was interested enough by her look to delve into the author's life. What she has managed to do with Angelmonster is take a life that many readers think they know and humanize it on multiple levels. May Shelley was not a typical young woman of her day (with a father like hers that is to be expected) but how she was able to function, let alone be creative, in the face of such overwhelming tragedy just blew me away. And how in the hell she put up with Percy Shelley I will never understand. Clearly she had a powerful love for that man; an overwhelming and impressively powerful love.
Angelmonster is one of those books that is just pitch perfect for readers of historical fiction who are also fans of literary lives. It's the kind of title I find hard to resist and I was so glad that Bennett nailed it. She admits at the end to changing dates just a bit (she has Mary publish the book after Shelley's death) but it is the tale of their love affair and marriage that consumes the plot. It is also a interesting look at a creatvie mind that overcame the sort of odds that modern writers can not imagine. After reading the book I went surfing to learn more about both Shelleys (and Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont and all the others), something I have never felt compelled to do before. You have to love any book that spurs that curiousity, even so many years after I thought I already knew everything that mattered about Mary Shelley.
May 15
2006
12:17 PM
This book doesn't feature Mary, but you should check out Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley, which is largely about Byron and his daughter he never knew, Ada Lovelace, another tough and brilliant woman to come out of the romantics.