Love & Other Monsters
In this luminous and transportive tale, Emily Franklin imagines the “summer” of 1816 at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where a circle of famous young writers gathered at a mansion in one of the coldest summers on record.
Love & Other Monsters imagines the conversations, secrets, and passionate attachments among the 19th century’s brightest poetic minds: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. But the star of this story is a lesser-known figure: Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister, and a writer in her own right. Along with Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, the five spend a freezing summer at Byron’s rented Villa Diodati. It was here that Mary Shelley penned her masterpiece, Frankenstein, but it was also where Byron and Claire continued their steamy affair begun earlier that spring in London. The story begins in 1879 when Claire discovers a journal she thought was lost, the journal she kept over that spring and summer in 1816 when she first met, seduced, and fell in love with Byron.
Written from Claire’s perspective, readers are transported from the grimy streets of London, where she lives with Mary and Percy, to chilly Lake Geneva, where a resistant Byron succumbs again to Claire’s fiery nature and winsome intellect. Franklin’s research underpins this endearing story, and readers will savor her vivid prose, woman-centered perspective, and the fascinating—if complex—relationship between Mary and Claire she excavates thoughtfully. Claire is revealed as an unappreciated yet pivotal figure in Mary Shelley’s life, and the sexually charged dynamic between Claire and the diffident ladies’ man Byron—who fathered a child with her—is both candid and unfiltered.
In Love & Other Monsters, Franklin returns readers to the electric circle at Lake Geneva and delivers a novel as singular and lightning charged as the moment that inspired Frankenstein itself. Recommended.
