How does a story begin? Sometimes with a dream. From a dreamer.
It was a dark, stormy and spooky night, in a castle (okay a house, but it might as well have been a castle) of poets and writers, as eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley lay, tossing and turning, half-asleep, waking, yet dreaming all the same: about the monster that would become the impetus and subject of her own scary story; a creation soon to become a horror icon forever afterwards.
'Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein' is a lovely, gothic picture book for all ages. It is about Mary Shelley as a person, and how she came about writing 'Frankenstein', or 'The Modern Prometheus'. Linda Bailey puts much emphasis on Mary being a dreamer. Always reading, always off on her own imagined worlds, and writing only a smidgen of what those great worlds in her head are. As a girl who only knew her mother, a pioneer of feminism and also a writer, from her gravestone, and who learned to read and write there, it seemed Mary was destined for a life surrounded by the macabre and gothic horror.
She's a rebel and runaway who, on a night of group ghost story telling, was set a task by Lord Byron to write her own ghost story. But it appeared that for once she was stuck on ideas, despite inspirational imagery striking all around her. Until her imagination is unwittingly flared by the knowledge of new scientific discoveries and experiments on dead animals, that looked like they could be shocked back to life.
And from this imaginative girl's dreams came Frankenstein's monster, a creature stitched up of dead human body parts. It is a fear that she would share with the world.
Dark and thrilling for the creative type. 'Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein' isn't only about Mary Shelley's life; it is about the power of imagination and dreaming, for as Bailey says, writers dream when they are both asleep and awake. It quenches the thirst of any writer, especially writers of horror and grotesque fantasy.
The illustrations are wonderful. The art by Júlia Sardà is haunting enough by itself, but there are details hidden within: book titles, foreshadowing of the story of 'Frankenstein', and other creepy symbols in Mary's circle and life, some subtler than others.
Beautiful. And I don't even like 'Frankenstein'. I just love reading about women writers of fantasy and horror. From the 19th century, full of revolutionary scientific discoveries, and the barest of social changes (one negative aspect about the picture book is that it could have given further details about Mary's mother and her feminism; not to mention other women such as Mary's stepsister Claire). More remarkable is that Mary was eighteen-to-nineteen-years-old when she wrote the famous book. She met Lord Byron as well, linking 'Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein' to another picture book I own about a brilliant-minded woman of the 19th century, 'Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine'; Ada Lovelace was Byron's daughter.
But enough about men. This is about the women.
This is about Mary.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: with a love of daydreaming, reading, words, symbolism, allegory, dark storytelling, and the beauty in the macabre and gothic, we may have a shared kinswomanship.
Final Score: 4/5
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