Customer Reviews

The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
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The authors did a fantastic job assembling the fascinating lives of Mary Shelley, Percy, and Lord Byron. After reading Frankenstein, I could not believe such a young woman had written the story, and wanted to know more about the author.

This book answers the question of how a young woman could develop and write such a story. Her life story and the people that surround her make for a very interesting read. I was shocked and surprised by many facts throughout this work. For a non fiction book, it was a real page turner and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it.

I bought this book because I was curious as to the origins of "Frankenstein" and walked away with a desire to learn a lot more about the central figures. The authors do an excellent job of recalling the life of Mary Shelley (which was tragic) and the rest of the group that met that "dark and stormy night" in 1816 to tell ghost stories.
Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori were all figures I knew marginally but the Hooblers have made them live in the pages of this wonderfully diverse study. They were fascinating people.
I recommend this book wholeheartedly. There are very few biographies as engaging as "The Monsters". Anyone with an interest in literature, monsters or just interesting people will enjoy this book.

The Monsters by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler is a fascinating read about the creation of the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The book traces Mary's family tree as well as the other members of the Diodati circle in a way that gives a great deal of insight into their characters. Both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron come off as the foolish geniuses they were. The authors spend a great deal of time sorting out the two men's various affairs, but apparently that's what they had to do as well! The real victim of these men and their foibles were their children. Percy and Mary lost four of their five children before the age of four. And Byron's abandonment of his daughter seems especially tragic as she died not long after. The Hooblers do a terrific job of analyzing Frankenstein in a way relevant for our time as well as Mary's, and they see parallels between Percy, William Godwin (Mary's father) and Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The insightful writing gives the reader extreme sympathy for Mary. She identified with the monster in her book because it had been rejected by its father figure, much as Mary was not only by her father, but also by her mentor Percy. The monsters in this book are not the kind of nightmares; they are the monster from Mary's famous book. Every one of them felt alone and cut off from the world, just like the monster. It's a universal human feeling, which is why Frankenstein has resonated through the years more strongly that Shelley's or Byron's poems, and the young woman who was ignored by the poets has outshone them finally.

The title and first review may give the false impression that the Hooblers argue that those who were with Mary Shelley at Lake Geneva were literally, supernaturally cursed. This is not so; the term "cursed" is used here and there, but the authors are quite secular and provide plenty of all-natural reasons why those who lived fast died young.

Rather, the Hooblers argue that Frankenstein was rather more a reflection of Mary Shelley's tumultuous parentage, upbringing and life than even she may have realized, and they make a good case for that.

The book starts off slowly, but by the time it begins to chronicle Mary Shelley's life for the period before and after Lake Geneva, it settles into a smooth, informative narrative which truly gives a sense of how frantic these young lives were.

The Monsters is a fascinating read about some of the most fascinating literary figures of the 18th and 19th century. It even has sections of pictures to better understand what these people looked like (which is important, especially for Byron).

The book is far more than just the creation of the literary masterpiece Frankenstein. It spans the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: from her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men), and her father, William Goodwin, until her end. The book details the biographies of major Romantic literary figures, such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even includes the mention of Thomas Love Peacock, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and others.

I found the material dense and the pace a little slow at times. Someone interested in the topic will have their appetite for scandal and genius satiated with this work; although I would caution the more general reader. Having known the bare minimum of this era of literature, I found the background information to be enlightening, and quickly brought me up to speed with the history and people. Recommended

This book focuses on the life of Mary Shelley, which was tragic. It appears to be well-researched (I don't know enough to contradict any of their conclusions) and was very interesting, one of my nightly "just before I go to sleep" reads. There is plenty of detail about the lives of Mary's parents, her family, her very famous husband, Percy, and other historical individuals, most notably Lord Byron. But the authors keep the pace moving and do not get bogged down in dull details.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the authors freely gave their opinion on Mary and the people in her life, making the biography more accessible and less a dry textbook. There is some very interesting (and spooky) details about Percy's early death and Mary's bizarre reaction to it. They also attempt to dispel the lurid falsehoods told by Lord Byron's enemies and paint a portrait of the true man, one of Europe's first celebrity idols. He was still a bad character, and I cannot help but wonder how Mary's personal life would have improved if she and Percy had never met the man; however, would Frankenstein been written and Percy become a belated star?

I came away from the novel with a deep sense of pathos about Mary and a new sense of her greatness in literary history. In a way, Mary's life was a Gothic horror story, full of real life monstrous individuals.

The general story has been covered before, but here the Hooblers provide a readable update to the creation of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and the surrounding events of her life. In 1816, the poet Lord Byron challenged some friends to come up with ghost stories, leading to not just Mary's classic but also to the first modern vampire novel (by associate John Polidori). Here the Hooblers compile the latest knowledge of everyone involved, leading to useful biographies of Mary Shelley, her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Polidori, Mary's proto-feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, her anarchist father William Godwin, and everyone else involved in Mary's literary life.

You'll be surprised by the free love and loose morals of all the protagonists, displayed during a brief lapse in the puritanism and patriarchy of European society when they were all in their primes. Percy and Byron come across in particular as irresponsible tail-chasing scumbags, with poor Mary suffering under her disrespectful and condescending male loved ones. But the Hooblers handily illustrate the social and historical inspirations for all these literary geniuses. They also provide a biographical reconstruction of "Frankenstein" and search for the parallels with Mary's life. This presents the only minor flaw in this book, as the Hooblers sometimes go overboard in conjecturing the inner private thoughts of Mary (and the others to a lesser extent) - regardless of the extensive use of letters and personal diaries as sources.

Indeed, Byron's challenge eventually lead to the early deaths of almost everyone involved, with poor Mary surviving but dealing with a parade of personal tragedies that would have killed a weaker person several times. This wasn't really a "curse" mind you, just the result of the reckless lifestyles and poor health care of the times in which they lived. Here the Hooblers have provided a consistently readable multi-biography and literary review, based on a fresh reading of primary sources, of a unique troupe of literary fellow travelers. [~doomsdayer520~]

It's axiomatic that genius is often characterized by questionable social skills and/or behavior, and it would appear to hold true in the case of Mary Shelley's circle of family and friends. The Hooblers present unflinching portraits of Mary, her husband Percy, father William Godwin and friend, Lord Byron among others. Mary receives the kindest treatment next to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) Both Marys suffer at the hands of the men in their lives, and Mary the younger spends a good deal of time trying to make some sense of that suffering. But the men... they are true pieces of work. They are all selfish, self-centered, arrogant and cruel even in their affections. They seem to have little use for the women in their lives, less for the children they father promiscuously. They live for their "art" and the pleasures it buys them. And in spite of that art, they are not particularly attractive when viewed through this lens. Of the three most prominent women in the book, Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, is the least talented and the most unpalatable thanks mostly to her single-minded pursuit of Lord Byron and her possible romantic involvement with her sister's husband, Percy Shelley.

I picked up the book originally because I have long been fascinated by the events of that "haunted summer" of 1816 when Byron challenged his friends to write a ghost story. The Hooblers present those events as a kind of centerpiece to the larger story of Mary Shelley, beginning with a short but careful examination of her mother's life with an eye to how it affected Mary's life and writing. One is tempted to wonder how Wollstonecraft might have viewed her daughter's elopement with Percy Shelley, and her writing career. As it is her death, not even a fortnight after the birth of her younger daughter, was the first of many losses that informed Mary Shelley's work. And in less than a quarter century, the younger Mary would lose three children, a half-sister, her husband and the love -- such as it was -- of her own father because of her relationship with Shelley. She would be haunted by the suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, and her husband's chronic infidelities, possibly even with Claire. It's no wonder that she produced one of the most memorable horror novels ever penned.

I bought this book after seeing the movie "Gothic", wondering how many liberties that movie took with the real story. The true story about the five people involved in that summer when Mary Shelley dreamed up the story that became Frankenstein is even better. The incredible gossip-infested lifestyles of these people are far more interesting than any reality TV or scripted drama today. Their personalities shine in this book and you'll learn about fascinating related people that you may not have known about. For example, Dr. Polidori may have set the template for the vampire as we know him in every incarnation today (yeah, I'm even thinking Twilight)! I highly recommend this book for horror fans, literary fans, or anyone just looking for an incredible true story.

This is perhaps the best biography I have ever read. It's almost novelesque in the brilliancy of its storytelling. The book is about the complex web of relationships between Mary Shelley, her not yet husband, Percy Bysche Shelley, and George Gordon Lord Byron. Threaded into this are Mary's step-sister (the mother of one of Byron's children) and a dozen or so other literary and philosophical figures of the time. The narrative, somehow without loosing focus or momentum, takes us back into the lives of the poets' parentage, including a close up look at Mary's parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who were important figures in their time. In doing so, we are allowed an opportunity to understand just how their aims at a marriage free society and equal rights for women affected Mary as a child and molded her into the woman who would run away with a poet and write a horror classic.

In fact the Frankenstein was the result of a dare issued by Byron himself. After a night of ghost stories and stormy weather, in which Percy Shelley was reduced to screams and tears and fist of terror (Mary's breasts were staring at him), Byron proposed that they each, along with his personal physician (and what else?) construct a horror story of their own. Byron started, but did not finish. As did Percy. Polidori began the first tentative passages that would one day become "The Vampyre" the model by which Bram Stoker and Stephanie Myer would one day fashion their vampires. The young and apparently inconsequential Mary had nothing, however, until a dream, several days later inspired the birth of Frankenstein's monster. Hers was the only story to be finished as a direct result of the dare, and, as we know, she became a formidable literary figure in her own right. As for "The Vampyre", it was published many years later, and only as a result of Polidori's bitterness toward Byron, in which the great poet is resembled in the key figure.

This book is so full of language and atmosphere, it really deserves a star place on my shelf. Though I am not a student of the Romantics or of the Regency era, it is, nevertheless, a fascinating peek into the lives of a few kindred souls who, for a time, steered that ship. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the era or the Romantic movement, or in the poets and authors themselves, or...well...anyone really who likes to hear a good story well told. And it's all true. You couldn't make up fiction this extraordinary.