October 31, 2025

Monster Reads for Halloween

I read Frankenstein with my family this year, and we liked it a lot (unlike, say, The Iliad, which you might recall we ditched for Anastasia Krupnik, by Lois Lowry, which went over much better). And because the only biography of Mary Shelley I’d read until now has been the picture book Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein, by Linda Bailey, gorgeously illustrated by Julia Sarda, I was excited to find a copy of a Mary Shelley bio by none other than Muriel Spark at the Victoria College book sale last month to fill in the gaps in my Mary Shelley knowledge—although Spark’s book was a source for Bailey’s and you’d be surprised at how much she managed to cover with a pretty minimal word count.

Bailey didn’t include what a rat bastard Lord Byron was, however—impregnating Mary’s stepsister and then stealing the child away to live in a convent because he didn’t want his child raised by athiests, and then the baby died. Oh my god, so many babies died, Mary losing three of her children. And Percy Shelley died in a shipwreck. Meanwhile, Lord Byron was telling everybody that Shelley had knocked up their maid, which wasn’t even true, and Byron fought against Mary’s attempts to clear her husband’s name because those attempts would have outed him a vicious gossip. 200 year old scandal is more fascinating than I thought it would be, and reading it as filtered through Spark’s lens (she doesn’t think much of these people’s godless ways!)

The biography is divided into two parts, and I’m near the end of the biographical details. The next part is a critical assessment of her literary work. Maybe it’s time I read something by Mary Shelley other than Frankenstein…