IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY
THE GIRL WHO WROTE FRANKENSTEIN
Profile Books, 320pp, £18.99, Oldie price £11.21 inc p&p The 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein provides the marketable pretext for Fiona Sampson’s new life of Mary Shelley. Writing in the Times, Paula Byrne found it hard to resist the story’s Keith-richards-avant-la-lettre overtones: Percy’s ‘penchant for triangular relationships’, Byron’s Lake Geneva house-party ‘fuelled by drink and drugs’. Neither biographer nor reviewer seem much interested in the novelist’s life, or even output, after death silenced the famous Romantics in her life: ‘none of her later works matches up to Frankenstein, so the biography inevitably becomes less interesting in its later pages’.
Ruth Scurr in the Financial Times compared Sampson’s new book to an earlier study by Muriel Spark, a writer who, like Sampson, thought of herself primarily as a poet. Spark kept her subject’s life and work firmly separate, and was interested in the content of the work beyond
Frankenstein; whereas Sampson, not unexpectedly amid the publishing bonanza of the bicentenary, uses biographical material as ‘a series of clues – palimpsests, through which it is possible to trace the biography’, which, however, seems to be as much an exegesis of the novel as a life of the woman.
In the Guardian Rachel Hewitt was particularly gripped by one of the earliest such palimpsests, an episode of childhood eczema or psoriasis that caused young Mary to regard her own arm as ‘like a monstrous appendage stitched from some other body on to her own’. Hewitt was by implication sceptical about Sampson’s apparent suggestion that Mary Shelley had been in some way airbrushed from literary history, lightly taking issue with any ‘supposed erasure’. Pondering Sampson’s somewhat lopsided coverage, ‘this sifting of a life according to moments that posterity has deemed consequential’, led Hewitt sagely to compare Sampson’s genre to Shelley’s masterpiece: ‘Biographers are the blind side to the reflection, the Frankenstein to the pieced-together creature.’