Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics
“In 1814, two years before the notorious “Gothic Summer” in Geneva, 16-year-old Mary Godwin eloped to Paris with the 22-year-old poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, inviting Mary’s 15-year-old step-sister Claire Claremont to go with them. They would walk across war ravaged France to Switzerland and up the Rhine River to a castle called Frankenstein. Three years later, Mary would publish the diaries she kept of that journey of two teenage girls and the poet of ‘free love’. In the published version of “A History of a Six Week’s Tour” she would tell where they went and what they saw, but she never revealed the true secrets of that trip, from where a later inspiration arose.”
The always-fruitful subject of the exact origins of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein, forms the kernel of Michael January’s entertaining “collaboration” with Mary Shelley. This is a historical novel that takes the form of a long-suppressed private journal Shelley kept of her travels and adventures with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary’s younger stepsister, Claire Claremont.
January has exhaustively researched the primary sources for Mary Shelley’s life and times, and he has carefully, skillfully, adapted and augmented them in order to create a story that is short on actual plot but long on memorable characters, and that will make readers see the seminal classic Frankenstein in a new light.
