John Lauritsen debunks the myth that Frankenstein was written by a teenaged girl, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), who took part in a ghost-story contest in Geneva, had a nightmare, and was inspired to write a story "which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!" Lauritsen examines the Frankenstein text, along with works that Mary Shelley wrote entirely on her own, to demonstrate that she was a weak and sentimental writer, incapable of writing Frankenstein. He takes a long, hard look at the extra-textual evidence that has been used to argue for her authorship, and shows that none of it stands up to scrutiny. In reality, Frankenstein is not just a scary story, but a work of profound and radical ideas, written in poetically powerful prose by one of the greatest poets in the English language, Percy Bysshe Shelley. For personal reasons he chose to conceal his authorship. This book has three theses: 1. Frankenstein is a great work, which has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted. 2. The real author of Frankenstein is Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his second wife, Mary. 3. Male love is a central theme of rankenstein. According to Lauritsen, male love, as romantic male friendship, is a central theme of Frankenstein. Sometimes the expressions of male love are remarkably direct, but at other times they are expressed in coded language or references known only to the "initiated". He uses his skills as a gay historian to decode and interpret these references.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Camille Paglia:
I read a fabulous book last week -- John Lauritsen's "The
Man Who Wrote Frankenstein".... Its thesis is that the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and not his wife, the feminist idol, Mary Shelley,
wrote "Frankenstein" and that the hidden theme of that book is
male love.
I read a fabulous book last week -- John Lauritsen's "The
Man Who Wrote Frankenstein".... Its thesis is that the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and not his wife, the feminist idol, Mary Shelley,
wrote "Frankenstein" and that the hidden theme of that book is
male love.
As I sat there reading while proctoring exams, I tried
unsuccessfully to stifle my chortles and guffaws of admiring
laughter -- which were definitely distracting the students in the
first rows. Lauritsen's book is important not only for its
audacious theme but for the devastating portrait it draws of the
insularity and turgidity of the current academy. As an independent
scholar, Lauritsen is beholden to no one. As a consequence, he can
fight openly with myopic professors and, without fear of
retribution, condemn them for their inability to read and reason.
This book, which is a hybrid of mystery story, polemic and paean
to poetic beauty, shows just how boring literary criticism has
become over the past 40 years. I haven't been this exhilarated by
a book about literature since I devoured Leslie Fiedler's
iconoclastic essays in college back in the 1960s. All that cr*ppy
poststructuralism that poured out of universities for so long
pretended to challenge power but was itself just the time-serving
piety of a status-conscious new establishment. Lauritsen's book
shows what true sedition and transgression are all about.
Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a
badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the
soaring prose of "Frankenstein" (which has her husband's intensity
of tone and headlong cadences all over it) and that the so-called
manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work
she did for many writers as a copyist....
The stupidity and invested self-interest of prominent literary
scholars are lavishly on display here in exchanged reproduced from
a Romanticism listserv or in dueling letters to the editor, which
Lauritsen forcefully contradicts in acerbic footnotes. This is a
funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire
ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for
truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear. --Camille Paglia, Salon.com, 14 March 2007.
Jim Herrick:
John Lauritsen is a gay scholar who has challenged many received
truths.... Now he has got his teeth into what he regards as
another myth. The powerful novel Frankenstein was not written by
Mary Shelley, as all the world's libraries will have you believe,
but by Percy Bysshe Shelley himself.
He presents mountains of evidence, much of which is
startlingly persuasive. He considers that Mary Shelley's lack of
formal education would not have fitted her for such a literary
composition. This ignores the intelligence of her parents Mary
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. But the most stunning evidence
comes when you put Frankenstein, a masterpiece, beside her other
novels, for instance Valperga and The Last Man, the turgid,
pallid, banal novels she wrote after Percy Bysshe Shelley's death.
This argument is reinforced when the edition revised in 1831 by
herself and William Godwin is put beside the 1818 edition: almost
every alteration weakens the text of the original....
She did her husband's oeuvre great disservice by
bowdlerising later editions, turning him into a Victorian angel
"suitable for enshrinement among the gods of respectability and
convention". She prettified the radical, whose unorthodox beliefs
covered politics, sexual relationships, marriage, diet, and
religion.
Perhaps the summit of Lauritsen's case is the evidence of
ideas relating to revolution, forgiveness, science, revenge,
psychology, and nature, which are so characteristic of Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley showed no intellectual interest in
such topics.
The extra-textual evidence is examined carefully and I am
convinced that the three friends who in Switzerland agreed each to
write a story of the supernatural are Byron, Polidori and Percy
Bysshe Shelley. The original of Frankenstein is found in Mary
Shelley's handwriting, but this is no argument for her authorship,
because she often acted as scribe for Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The most substantial chapter deals with Male Love in
Frankenstein. Lauritsen is convincing that Percy Bysshe Shelley,
had homoerotic feelings and deep friendships for men....
The strongest argument for Percy Bysshe Shelley's authorship
is the imagination and ideas and poetry of Frankenstein, and
Lauritsen presents this powerfully. In the monster's discussion
with a blind old man, in the prayer for vengeance, in the
description of the craggy Swiss scenery (which demonstrates a
pantheistic tinge typical of Percy Bysshe Shelley) the novel has
enormous sweep. Lauritsen's book does readers a great service by
bringing out Frankenstein's stature as a "profound and moving
masterpiece". --Jim Herrick, Gay Humanist Quarterly, Spring 2007
Andrew Calimach:
The thesis of the work: it was Shelley himself, and not his
uneducated, prosaic, teenage wife, who wrote the profound,
complex, poetic and very masculine Frankenstein. Yes, I was
persuaded by his argument, but that is a determination that every
reader will have to make for himself. Instead I would like to
concentrate on his approach, which can best be described as
minimalist, and all the more effective for it.
The first part of the book has the quality -- rare for a
work of literary criticism -- of being a suspenseful page turner,
much like a good detective novel, for a detective is what
Lauritsen is, and he does it particularly well and with
understated humor. He is at his best when he lets academics who
argue for Mary Shelley's authorship undermine their own arguments.
In the excitement of it all one might almost miss the fact that an
enormous amount of research has gone into building this case,
research that pulls together correspondence, comments, and
manuscript evidence, and which convincingly recreates the mores
and ways of the world in which Frankenstein was conceived and
written.
Even more eye-opening is the second part of the work, in
which Lauritsen reads the text from the perspective of a gay
historian pointing out instance after instance of homoerotic
imagery and encoded social commentary in a work heretofore thought
to be a mere one-dimensional horror story. It is a skillful
textual analysis, made all the easier by the fact that few have
preceded him, allowing Lauritsen to romp through virgin territory.
He does it well and thoroughly....
Not that this book is all about the Shelleys
and Frankenstein. It is also about Lauritsen himself, who allows his
personality, by turns cranky and profound, to shine through. It is
an eccentric touch, a fitting flourish for a work that is anything
but mainstream, and which aims to shake that mainstream by the
scruff of its stuffy scholarly neck. I personally hope it
succeeds. --Andrew Calimach, author of Lovers Legends: The Gay Greek Myths
About the Author
John Lauritsen studied English Literature and Social Relations at Harvard. A retired market research analyst, his writings, including ten books, have won him international acclaim.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exposing the truth,
By Geoff Puterbaugh (Chiang Mai, T. Suthep, A. Muang Thailand) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Paperback)
Other reviewers have discussed the details of this wonderful book, so I will just mention (again) the incredible tedium induced by the novels actually written by Mary Godwin (perhaps in collaboration with her giftless papa). Readers armed with a Kindle can get "The Last Man" for a very low price, and then try to compare that novel with "Frankenstein." Anyone with a taste for English style can tell the difference in an instant.
I should note, by the way, that almost no one thinks that Mary Godwin wrote "Frankenstein" all by herself. Everyone agrees that her husband, the renowned Percy Bysshe Shelley, played an important editorial role. The Lauritsen thesis is that Shelley wrote the whole novel. In the end, it may come down to disagreement about very little. Any writer who has submitted a manuscript to an editor with Other Ideas has seen his original writing returned with massive changes. Two or three rounds of this, and the original author will be thinking "That's not what I wrote!" But will the supremely lazy and ill-informed English Academy take note of this?? Or even explore the possibility that it may be true? It's hard to say, since the Departments of "English" for the past five decades have mostly been in the hands of incoherent blowhards, preaching Derrida, Foucault and Deconstruction, while ignoring the precious heritage of English literature handed down to them. This scandal about "Frankenstein" is only one of the items they have ignored. I would mention A. L. Rowse's magisterial discussions of Shakespeare's Sonnets as another, and the whoopee-cushion pretense that Walt Whitman was not gay, as a third.
24 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Amateurish "scholarship.",
By
This review is from: The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Paperback)
While this was an engrossing (if sometimes eye-rollingly ridiculous) read, it fails as scholarship. Lauritsen's argument is plausible on the surface, but he offers very little compelling evidence. He never makes his case. Rather, he suggests that a certain passage _may_ refer to this instead of that.
He absolves himself from responsible scholarship early in the book by proclaiming that as an independent scholar, he needn't always provide evidence for his claims, especially those that are obvious. The problem is, his claims are only obvious to those who share his agenda. To the rest of us they're interesting, but speculation and vague (and sometimes way over the top) suggestion will not convince most critical readers. A typical tactic Lauritsen uses is quoting a passage of _Frankenstein_ and then making a statement like "Obviously this is Shelley and not Mary! Anyone who has read Shelley and recognizes his genius will recognize that he is the author!" Oh, okay. You got me! That really is incontrovertible proof. I'd love to see this argument made and defended by an actual scholar rather than a hobbyist.
8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Boldly original scholarship,
By William A. Percy "William A. Percy" (Professor of History, UMass Boston) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Hardcover)
Readable and cogently argued, this book represents independent scholarship at its best. John Lauritsen is not afraid to go off the beaten path. He has shorn his style of scholarly impedimenta, but when references are necessary he gives them. His most controversial thesis, and one that will bring Academic Furies down on his head, is that Frankenstein, now one of the most read English novels, was not written by Mary Shelley, but by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great poet. He convincingly presents and analyzes a vast amount of evidence, both textual and external. The real Mary Shelley had no sense of prose style. As Lauritsen puts it: "She could never have written Frankenstein."
Most interesting to me was the longest chapter ("Male Love in Frankenstein"), which takes the reader through the novel, following the thread of love and friendship between males. Here Lauritsen, as a well known gay historian, comes into his own. He shows that an early passage in Frankenstein, where Captain Robert Walton expresses his aching desire for a male friend, is almost a paraphrase from a passage in Shelley's "Essay on Friendship". He highlights passage after passage, all written in lush Shelleyan prose, which express romantic male friendship. When Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, males were still being hanged in England for committing the "detestable & abominable Vice of Buggery." (Mary's name was first attached as author in her father's reprint of 1823, one year after Shelley's death.) Understandably, overt homosexual references are missing from Frankenstein, though undefined sexuality is present. The poor monster is sexually frustrated, rejected by everyone. At one point he tells his creator, Victor, that he is "consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify." Ostensibly he is asking Frankenstein to create a female monster for him; but he is really that horny, he wants Frankenstein to gratify him immediately, right on the spot. Bu this is left to the imagination. Lauritsen's style is clear, concise and witty; sometimes it is quirky or cantankerous, and all the better for it. Five stars.
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