Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein

Things were never easy for Mary Shelley. Her mother, proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died when the girl was only a few days old. Raised in a downwardly mobile household headed by a financially feckless father and a cruel stepmother, Mary became familiar with anxiety, loss, and rejection at an early age. When she became a teenager and fell in love, she fell hard – for a brilliant, unstable, and married poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley. By the time she was 25, Mary was a widow who had already buried two children – and written a novel about bringing the dead to life.

 

This evocative graphic novel is illustrated in heavy blacks and grays that provide an appropriately gloomy backdrop for the free verse poems that describe the painful events of Mary’s life and her resilience in turning those events to the service of her art. 

 

Gothic horror readers, fans of the British Romantic poets, and anyone who enjoyed “Frankenstein” will find this book hard to resist.