A new take on Mary Shelley’s legendary summer: The Glowing Hours, by Leila Siddiqui

BY ELIZABETH CRACHIOLO

Leila Siddiqui has always been fascinated by the summer in 1816 when Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori vacationed at Lake Geneva. It was that gloomy summer that produced Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s infamous novel about isolation and grief. Several historical novels published in recent years have explored different aspects of Mary’s stay at Lake Geneva, but none of them have done it like The Glowing Hours (Soho Press, 2026). Siddiqui’s version of the well-enumerated events is unique, and even avoids centering Mary Shelley’s experience in the narrative. Instead, Siddiqui grounds her tale in the experiences of Mary Shelley’s (fictional) housemaid, Mehrunissa Begum, an unlucky Indian noblewoman stranded in England as she searches for her brother and forced by circumstance to work for a living.

Mehrunissa, or Mehr, is an unusual addition to the canon of Lake Geneva retellings. “I like to center my novels on South Asian characters and give them narratives that they don’t always belong in,” says Siddiqui. “We can be in Gothic novels, we can exist in historical epics, we can be the heroes of these stories. We have always been here but you never get to see us.”

Her focus on this perspective began when she was a teenager and learned for the first time about the Partition of India in 1947 and Indian soldiers’ participation in World War II on behalf of the Allies. She realized that Western audiences may not be well-versed in these historical facts. She wrote her first novel, House of Glass Hearts, for young readers, particularly South Asian teenagers, who might be curious about such events and want the nuanced portrait that Western history books don’t cover.

As for The Glowing Hours, “it was the book I wanted to read that hadn’t been written yet,” says Siddiqui, after Toni Morrison. She wanted to explore the intersections of India and England at the inception of British colonialism—“because history doesn’t just belong to the West.” The novel’s focus on Mehrunissa came from Siddiqui’s reading, long ago, of William Dalrymple’s book White Mughals, which describes the true story of a British soldier who married an Indian teenager named Khair-un-Nissa Begum, had children with her, and then abandoned her to poverty, taking their children back to Britain. In Siddiqui’s novel, it is Mehrunissa’s father who plays this role, taking her brother back to England and abandoning her and her mother. “There were many Mehrunissas that existed and I wanted to give life to her story,” says Siddiqui.

author photo by Ruby Grais

To write the novel, Siddiqui took time off from her day job and made good use of the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Contemporaries. She was trying to fill the gaps left by the scant memoirs written by those who stayed at the villa in Geneva that summer. Mary Shelley’s memoirs had been censored, and Lord Byron’s had never made it to publication. “I had very little to work with,” she says, “but it allowed me to stretch my imagination and fill in the blanks.”

Her imagination was captured by the isolated circumstances of the travellers and eerie real-life setting—it was called “the year without a summer” because the weather was abnormally cold and rainy. The Glowing Hours uses lots of gothic tropes, including a haunted mansion, gloomy weather, secrets, a darkly alluring male figure, and the possibility of madness. “Even in true life it’s the perfect gothic tale,” Siddiqui observes.

The elements of horror in the gothic are familiar to Siddiqui, as she has always been attracted to supernatural stories, “with much thanks to my cultural upbringing. I believe South Asians are a fascinatingly morbid people and I love that for us.” For her, horror isn’t just about jump scares and zombies (though those are fun too). Describing her lifetime of watching horror movies in the theater, she describes the “communal feeling” that moviegoers feel of having survived something terrifying together. She also finds that horror as a genre has narrative utility. “I love consuming all horror media, whether books or film or television,” she says. “And I especially love how much truth there is in it. Horror is a perfect playground to explore nearly every theme imaginable.” Here, she explores British colonialism, misogyny, isolation, and family, using hauntings as a connective theme.

It was an ideal medium, Siddiqui feels: “For a Gothic horror novel, the real-life events that took place in Geneva in the summer of 1816 were such a perfect inspiration—a young woman experiences a horrific nightmare after an evening spent telling ghost stories, while she’s in this wind-swept villa—the story nearly writes itself.”

About the contributor: Elizabeth Crachiolo is a reviewer and feature writer for the Historical Novel Society.