Customer Reviews

The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein

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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.

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.

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.

I highly recommend this book for several reasons. First, the to and fro between the author and the academic establishment, which has a stake in maintaining a status quo perception of Mary Shelley's authorship and, judging from their comments both in the book and in reviews, resent anyone who is not inside their club challenging their views, makes for fascinating reading. Lauritsen's challenges to their received views are ballsy and often amusing.
Second, as a gay man, Lauritsen has insights into coded writing and signs that straights often lack. The case he makes for Percy Bysshe Shelley being the true author of Frankenstein, based in part on the obscured or oblique codes hidden in the text (a superb example of textual exegesis or "explication de texte") that a gay man is better equipped than most to detect, strikes me as compelling. It reminded me of Emory's comment in "Boys in the Band": "Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty." This book is original, to say the least, and makes for refreshing reading.

John Lauritsen argues that Frankenstein is a great work of literature, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is the author, and that the novel's dominant theme is male love.

I may be an easy mark for the first thesis because I have long considered the book a towering classic of English fiction, but I believe Lauritsen puts in a strong case.

The second thesis is the nearest an argument of this sort can get to a slam-dunk. The most compelling evidence is that which Lauritsen refers to with the phrase (from Aesop) HIC RHODUS, HIC SALTA, that is, Mary Shelley's later works do not begin to compare to Frankenstein in either scope or language.

The third thesis is dependent on the second, since Mary Shelley would not likely have written a book about male love. The importance of male friendship in the novel cannot be gainsaid. It is also clear that the novel is a moral allegory about intolerance. Lauritsen, however, goes beyond these two incontrovertible certainties and argues - persuasively - that the male friendships portrayed resonate as special friendships, and that the intolerance pilloried in the allegory reflects the specific intolerance of European society in Shelley's day toward gay men.

John Lauritsen has written a moving and passionate brief for (1) Percy Bysshe Shelley as a 19th century gay male and poet who wrote "Frankenstein," while emphasizing (2) what a great work of literature it is and (3) what a great male love-themed work it is.

The facts for the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley being the author of "Frankenstein" are plentiful, foremostly outlined in the Introduction, in the first chapter entitled "Review of 'Shelley's Fiction'," and in the second, third and fourth chapters entitled "The Extra-Textual Evidence" and "The Frankenstein Notebooks" and "The Textual Evidence," respectively.

(Note: While offering the evidence for Percy Bysshe Shelley as the author of "Frankenstein," John Lauritsen presents information by other scholars who evidence an unmistakable (straight) cognitive dissonance regarding the facts that are presented. While giving opposing evidence or opposing arguments often can strengthen an argument so as to make the logic and the truth of it stand out even more clearly, the information Mr. Lauritsen presents concerning these opinions and assessments of other scholars opposing his views merely retards the progress of reading for the reader, producing a scowling background "noise" wholly unnecessary to a reader's comprehension of Mr. Lauritsen's main three theses mentioned above. Why should the reader be pulled into a heated and irrational debate when "opposing counsel" is clearly not listening nor interested?)

The lengthy and wonderful middle chapter entitled "Male Love in Frankenstein" retells the entire plot of "Frankenstein" quite well while gazing on the main plot-points from a gay male perspective. It is the best and most moving, most stirring part of the book.

The book ends with a short "Conclusion" chapter and several Appendices, all of which are well worth reading. There, I was shocked to find Percy Bysshe's Shelley referring to the author in his own "Preface" to "Frankenstein" as "he," not "she" (Mary Shelley, the impossible but putative, ostensible author). Percy Bysshe Shelley had to publish this novel originally anonymously to avoid scandal, jail or death for having written it.

Not terrible, but not a fun read. It feels like listening to the author complain about arguments he's been having for years but can't seem to win. States conclusions before presenting enough background info, and repeats himself a lot. Doesn't tell the story of what really happened in any compelling way.

This is a wonderfully iconoclastic book, refreshingly written in non-academic language, and a persusuasive argument that Percy B Shelley and not his wife wrote the great horror classic. It is a must read for any student of English literature or any reader of Frankenstein. Whether you agree or not with Lauritsen's arguments, it is always important to challenge accepted academic wisdom. And there is very little real evidence that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstien or had the literary talent to do so. As for the homoerotic content of the novel, Lauritsen offers some intriguing examples of a homoerotic subtext throughout. CAmille PAglia, the famed critic, loved the book, and it is certainly well worth reading. A must read!!

I will give this obviously bias author, and many like him, the assumption that Mary Shelly's narrative was shaped in part by many thinkers, e.g. Wollstonecraft, Milton, Coleridge, Godwin, and of course her husband Percy. Yet, what author hasn't been influenced by the knowledge and creativity of their family and/or time in history?

Now, Percy undoubtedly contributed to the Preface, and other facets of the book, but that does NOT make this his story, vision, or philosophy. Going on argument that Mary was too 'uneducated' has no basis. Who was her father again? Oh yeah William Godwin, an intelligent and successful novelist and philosopher in his own right. Mary did not go to the male dominated university of Oxford like Percy (of which was brief and he did not excel by any means), so that automatically means she did not have the intelligence to write Frankenstein?! How incredibly sexist and elitist. The argument that Mary's follow up work was not as brilliant, well, there have been many through out history and continue to be those who create genius works and their succeeding efforts are lacking in comparison. This is simply not enough to strip Mary of her achievement.

Frankenstein argubly contains, and this opinion is backed my a wealth of genuine scholarship, feminist thought in several regards. Feminism is itself very radical, as with the emotions and experiences Frankenstein daringly explores. I see no reason there would not be concurrent themes of homosexuality if one looked long enough, and Lauritsen certainly has.

Another example of a man trying to discredit the incredible (and apparently unbelievable) notion that a woman could write such a book of everlasting importance.

St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, a Gothic horror novel that Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1811, has a similar and related theme to Frankenstein. Can man find the secret to life? In St. Irvyne, the alchemist and Rosicrucian Ginotti has "a desire of unveiling the latent mysteries of nature". St. Irvyne, and William Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) and Frankenstein, are based on a real-life German physician and scientist, Dr. Johann Heinrich Cohausen, who claimed to have found the secret to immortality in Hermippus Redivivus; or, The Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave (1742).

The main character of St. Irvyne is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who like the Being in Frankenstein, seeks friendship and a meaning for his existence. Both Wolfstein and Frankenstein are obsessed with solitude and are involved in a quest for meaning and human companionship. Wolfstein asks why he was created by the Creator. God creates nothing in vain. But Wolfstein can find no meaning for his creation. Wolfstein wanders the Swiss Alps near Geneva, the scene of the later Frankenstein. He is rescued by monks who prevent his attempted suicide. Bandits then attack them. Wolfstein poisons the leader of the bandits, Cavigni, and escapes. Megalena, also held captive, escapes and befriends Wolfstein. They flee to Genoa followed by Ginotti.

Ginotti is a Rosicrucian, a member of the Rose Cross Order, a medieval sect that sought through science, by chemistry or alchemy, to find the secret to eternal existence, immortality. This idea is based on the experiments conducted by Paracelsus, Sanctorius, the Belgian Rosicrucian Jan van Helmont, and by Johann Cohausen, who claimed to have found the secret to long life in Hermippus Redivivus. Volatile salts contained in the human breath were alleged to enable human life to be extended indefinitely.

Ginotti seduces Wolfstein's sister, Eloise de St. Irvyne, who wrongly believes that Wolfstein is dead. St. Irvyne is the name of a castle in France. Ginotti then will impart the secret to immortality to Wolfstein if he becomes a Rosicrucian himself and denies God. Ginotti asks: "Wolfstein, dost thou deny thy Creator?" Tragedy and horror result when man seeks to unveil the secrets of life and of nature.

St. Irvyne has uncanny and striking similarities to Frankenstein in both theme and in style. Both novels take place in the Swiss Alps around Geneva, where Percy Bysshe Shelley later lived. Both of the names of the main characters, Wolfstein and Frankenstein, are based on the names of German cities, Wolfstein, Germany and Frankenstein, Germany. Both novels have scientists who want to find the secret to eternal existence or immortality.

The alchemist in St. Irvyne asks: "Why may not human minds unveil the dim mists of futurity?" He determines that it is "possible to protract existence", to ensure "endless existence" and "eternal life". Ginotti reveals that "during the course of my philosophical inquiries, I ascertained the method by which man might exist for ever."

Percy Shelley had even written about the vampire theme, the undead who live forever, in the poem "The Spectral Horseman", line 13, from Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810): "Nor a yelling vampire reeking with gore."

Wolfstein, Ginotti, Zastrozzi, Matilda, and the Being in Frankenstein have no compunction about committing murder. Wolfstein murders Cavigni and planned to murder Olympia in cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder. Ginotti related how he murdered a fellow student with pre-meditation and in cold blood. The Being in Frankenstein, likewise, commits murders without any compunction.

The influence of John Milton is pervasive on both novels. Both novels have epigraphs from John Milton's Paradise Lost, as does Zastrozzi. Even the cadences and literary styles are similar in both novels. In Frankenstein, the Being says: "I will glut the maw of death." In St. Irvyne, the narrator says: "...glut itself with hellish pleasure..." In "Revenge", line 20, from Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), Shelley wrote: "Alone will I glut its all conquering maw." John Milton did not use "glut" as a verb, but Percy Bysshe Shelley did. Milton used "glut" as a noun. It is like Percy Bysshe Shelley left his fingerprints. The Being in Frankenstein, moreover, speaks in Shelleyan cadences that are a hallmark of St. Irvyne and the earlier Zastrozzi. How uncanny is that? Like Percy Shelley himself, the Being in Frankenstein has admired and adopted the style of John Milton, a poet, not a novelist. It is as if the Being's diction coach and language teacher was Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In both novels, the "pride", "vanity", and "malice" of man in seeking to become a God lead to disaster and tragedy. In an early poem, Shelley wrote: "I dare not unveil the shadows that float o'er eternity's vale." In St. Irvyne, the narrator admonished: "[L]et endless life be sought from Him...the God whom thou hast insulted." Unveiling the secrets of life and death is a "delusion of the passions", in both novels, reflecting the vanity of man and resulting in disaster and ruin and death.

Reading St. Irvyne reveals uncanny similarities to Frankenstein. St. Irvyne is available in several editions and is highly recommended. The Broadview Press edition also includes the rare chapbook Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit, a reduction of the St. Irvyne novel published in London by John Bailey, circa 1815.

John Lauritsen is not the only one who has noted that Percy Bysshe Shelley's ideas and background are mirrored perfectly in Frankenstein. Christopher Goulding, a British professor of literature, also showed convincingly in "The real Doctor Frankenstein?" (2002), which appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95 (5): 257-9. that the ideas, themes, motifs, and scientific background in the novel were those that related only to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley admitted in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein that she got the idea for the novel from her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley during his long conversations with Lord Byron:

"They [Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron] talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin ... who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with a voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and embued with vital warmth."

In the original 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley noted that Dr. Erasmus Darwin's experiments were a major source for the novel. But it was Percy Bysshe Shelley who was intrigued and fascinated by Darwin and his experiments, not Mary Shelley, who had no interest in science or science fiction. Mary Shelley only borrowed these ideas second-hand from Percy Bysshe Shelley. The genesis of the story for Frankenstein, thus, originated with Percy Bysshe Shelley, as Mary Shelley herself conceded.

Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who knew Shelley while he attended Oxford, wrote that Dr. James Lind, MD, FRS (1736-1812), a physcian, mentor, and instructor, "communicated to Shelley a taste for chemistry and chemical experiments." Lind's son Alexander described his father's room: "There were telescopes, Galvanic Batteries, Daggers, Electrical Machines, and all the diverse apparatus which a philosopher is supposed to possess." Hogg saw evidence of Shelley's interest in scientific experimentation in his room at Oxford, where he observed "an electrical machine, an air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and ... a small glass retort above an argand lamp." It was the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who placed an electric charge on the nerves of the leg muscles of frogs, that generated interest in electricity as the basis of life. Galvani published his research results in 1791 as Galvani L. Aloysii Galvani de viribus electricitatis in motu musculari. De Bononiensi Scientiarum et Artium Instituto atque Academia (1791), 7, 363-418.

Percy Bysshe Shelley evinced not only an interest in scientific experimentation, but also in medicine. He had read the medical work A View of the Nervous Temperament (1812) by Thomas Trotter and on December 28, 1814, he took Mary Shelley to a public lecture on galvanism and the medical uses of electricity given by André-Jacques Garnerin in London. Percy Bysshe Shelley was so excited by the topic that he went to the lecture the next evening but there was none given because the hall was closed. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who had an interest in medicine and galvanism, not Mary Shelley, who had none at all.

It is not disputed that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the original 1818 preface to the novel and he contributed at the very least 4,000 words to Frankenstein. He corrected the manuscript, made changes, made additions, rewrote parts, and changed passages. This is not in dispute. The only question is: How substantial was his contribution, and does it rise to the level where he should receive co-authorship? John Lauritsen makes a convincing case that Percy Bysshe Shelley should, at the very least, be given credit as co-author.