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Summary
Summary
The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Montillo recounts how--at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution--Shelley's Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists of the period: curious and daring iconoclasts who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it might be reanimated after death.
With true-life tales of grave robbers, ghoulish experiments, and the ultimate in macabre research--human reanimation--The Lady and Her Monsters is a brilliant exploration of the creation of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's horror classic.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Montillo's debut, a macabre romp through 18th and 19th century Europe, illuminates the circumstances and inspiration behind one of gothic literature's most notorious tales. Walking a fine line between historical fact and logical conjecture, the book deftly weaves details of Mary Shelley's early life into the cultural and scientific map of the time in which she was writing. Grim body snatchers, cadaver-carving surgeons, and nefarious alchemists litter the pages. In her retelling of the genesis story of Frankenstein, Montillo offers a constellation of personalities that surrounded Shelley during her hasty writing of the tale. Heavily referencing letters and personal journals, Montillo analyzes Shelley's literary cohorts, providing insight into the motives of her famous literary companions, the haunted Percy Shelley and womanizing Lord Byron. The picture painted provides much room for speculation, stripping long-embellished versions of the story down to the verifiable facts. Who really gave Shelley the technical know-how to write what she did? What were the true origins of her long-standing depression? Fraught with suicides, superstitions, natural disasters, and love affairs, the life of Mary Shelley shares much emotionally with the harrowing tale of her great protagonist, Victor Frankenstein. A delicious and enticing journey into the origins of a masterpiece. Illus. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative Management. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A cultural biography that explores how Mary Shelley came to write her gothic classic. Montillo (Literature/Emerson Coll.; Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead, 2009) discusses how Shelley's world, as well as her life, informed the creation of Frankenstein. The basic story of how the novel came to be written--during an informal ghost-story competition among Mary, husband Percy, Lord Byron and assorted friends--is the stuff of legend. Perhaps less known is how the idea of bringing the dead back to life was already common currency. Well before Shelley's birth, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani (source of the word galvanized) was hooking up electrical charges to dead frogs. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took matters further by conducting experiments on a dead felon. Percy Shelley, whose poetry had long been absorbed with immortality, was fascinated by this trend in science, which he would pass on to Mary. Entwined with the history of the idea is the history of the couple, which was tumultuous from the day married Percy met William Godwin's brilliant young daughter; their lives would be rocked by infidelities, jealousies and the early death of a child. "Dream[t] that my little baby came to life again," Mary wrote in a journal, an idea that may have helped inspire her future novel. Resurrection was in the air, both among doctors and artists. Montillo occasionally loses focus, getting a little overly involved in peripheral scandals and sensational tales, but the book is never dull. Mary Shelley lived in dramatic times, when life was too short to be boring. Light fare as cultural histories go, but a pleasant stroll through the Romantic imagination.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Scores of books and movies have retold the infamous tale of the ghost-story contest that gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but Montillo digs deeper (so to speak) in this dual history of literature and science. Half the book is simply one of the most readable biographical portraits you'll find of Mary Shelley the standoffish, spiteful, but brilliant daughter of a famous feminist mother and philosopher father, and whose torrid love affair with the wild poet Percy Shelley (aka Mad Shelley ) kicked off with premarital midnight sex in a cemetery and only got weirder from there. Alternating with Mary's narrative is the hellacious history of the rock-star anatomists of the 1700s, who enthralled Percy, and, by extension, Mary, with their grotesque forays into galvanism, the manipulation of dead muscle via electrical current. Both plots come lumbering at each other like, well, monsters until that fateful summer in Geneva when Mary stitched her various influences together into a single literary beast. Montillo is an academic but unafraid of salaciousness, injecting into her tale an invigorating solution of sex, gore, and gossip as we reach both the end of Mary's woeful life and the end of the anatomists' grave-robbing free-for-all as it ceded to the Anatomy Act. Sick, smart, shocking, and spellbinding.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE laboratory was dark that November evening. The young scientist watched the still body on the table, peering through shadows thrown by flickering candlelight. And then, through the gloom, he "saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open" and its limbs begin to twitch. Could there be a more classic example of monster-haunted suspense than this scene from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus"? But Shelley's story runs far deeper than simple horror fiction, and questions of suspenseful artistry are not the ones Roseanne Montillo asks in "The Lady and Her Monsters." Instead, she delves into the story behind this famously creepy moment: was it simply spun out of the imagination of a brilliantly neurotic young author? Or is it better described as the work of a highly educated woman grappling with the darker implications of early-19th-century scientific research? Montillo is far from the first author to ponder the real-life influences on Shelley's iconic tale; these are issues so well discussed that you can find many of them on Wikipedia. But Montillo achieves a freshness through her lively narrative approach and a fascination with long-ago science and its ethics that sparks across the pages. Her account essentially alternates between the writing of the novel and the experiments that inspired it. Montillo begins with the discovery of electricity's role in biology. In a classic late-18th-century experiment, the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani hung dead frogs from his balcony during a thunderstorm. The animals were impaled on metal hooks intended to attract an electric charge as the storm flashed its way across town. In response to a lightning strike or a boom of thunder, "their legs twitched in a way that made them seem as if they were ready to hop off the balcony and into the streets below." Today, the influence of Galvani's work is evident even in our lexicon, the way we use the word "galvanize," to mean startled into sudden activity. And it underlies our modern awareness that living systems naturally generate electrical current as a means of communication among cells (so that we are perfectly designed to respond to a jolt of electricity). But it was his less celebrated nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who most likely brought such ideas to Shelley's attention. Determined to foster greater appreciation for his uncle's work, Aldini went to London, where he continued public demonstrations - but this time with human bodies. In one such event, in the winter of 1803, he attached electrodes to the body of a man recently hanged for murder. He then attempted to wake the man from the dead using shocks of battery-generated electrical current. The experiment failed, but descriptions of the body's responses - the opening of an eye, the turning of the head, the convulsive tremors of the limbs - spread. As Montillo notes, the Aldini experiments echoed a deep public interest in the idea that science could somehow find a way to bring the dead back to life. There was a reason grave robbers, hired to steal corpses for medical research, were known as resurrectionists. There was hope that as doctors analyzed the body, part by part, they would find the source of whatever power animated this assemblage of bone and muscle, organ and tissue. And as people discussed these possibilities, Montillo writes, they also began to wonder: "Was man a creature created by a God who dished out values and properties according to his fancies? Or was man a machine powered by an internal galvanic fluid, which in turn could be sparked alive by a rush of electricity?" There seems little doubt that Mary Shelley was aware of this wonderfully tangled knot of science and philosophy. Born in 1797, she was the child of two wellknown intellectuals, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died shortly after her daughter's birth) and the political philosopher William Godwin. And her intimate circle, including her poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was fascinated by such ideas. Shelley, in fact, experimented with galvanism himself; as a student at Oxford University, he crammed his rooms with electrical machines, air pumps, glass containers, the very stuff of an archetypal mad scientist. Friends described the young scholar cranking up the current to a point that his "long wild locks bristled and stood on end." Shelley and Mary Godwin had notoriously eloped in 1814, when he was still married and she was not quite 17. Accompanied by Godwin's stepsister, they fled to Continental Europe and largely remained there, even after Shelley's first wife, Harriet, committed suicide and they were able to wed. It was during this period of transience that they visited George Gordon, Lord Byron, in Switzerland. It was the summer of 1816, cold and gray because of the fallout from a massive volcano eruption in Indonesia. The weather drove the group indoors, where Byron proposed a ghost story competition, and in response Mary Godwin - she married Shelley later that year - invented the story of Dr. Frankenstein. The young author credited a troubling dream of a scientist and his man-made monster as inspiration for the tale. But it's the other inspirations that give Montillo's book its incisive moments, such as when she notes the similarities between Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley: "Mary even chose the name Victor as a homage to Percy, who had used that name in his youth because he felt it showed power and strength." Would Percy have felt honored by this tribute? Frankenstein is a coward of a scientist, repulsed by what he's created, and his abandonment of the monster leads to a tragically murderous conclusion. Of course, neither of the Shelleys is particularly admirable in Montillo's telling. Her portrait of the creator of "Frankenstein" and her short-lived marriage (Percy Shelley died in a boating accident in 1822) is a study of self-absorbed neurotics. There's more affection here - or perhaps, more interest - in the real-life Dr. Frankensteins, their ethically dubious choices and their attempts to explain the workings of mind and soul. For it's this impulse that gives Mary Shelley's own book its enduring power. The moment Frankenstein's yellow-eyed monster blinks to life is also the beginning of a renewed quest to understand what that life actually means, what makes human existence something more than the low hum of an electrical connection. As Montillo reminds us, Shelley's story, written almost 200 years ago, raises questions worth exploring today because we're still figuring out the answers. Was man a machine powered by an internal galvanic fluid, which could be sparked alive by electricity? Deborah Blum, author of "The Poisoner's Handbook," is writing a book about the history of poisonous food additives.
