‘The modern Prometheus gets even more modern’ SFX

‘Superb’ Tim Harford

Take a look at the advance coverage:

SFX, Mediabistro.com, The Trollish Denver, At the Bookshelf, Wired.com, JaneFriedman.com and Smithsonian.com

Then watch the trailer.

Why not have a read of John Sutherland’s chapter on Mary Shelley taken from his superb Lives of the Novelists. Do you agree with his take on Mary’s creation?

Mary Shelley 1797–1851

The workshop of filthy creation.

‘‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’ (the double barrelling is significant) … was born in north London, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. He was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793); she was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary never knew her mother, who died of puerperal fever a week after her daughter’s
birth. Natal trauma scenarios haunted Mary through life and are central to her most famous novel. She grew up with a stepsister, Fanny (the illegitimate daughter of her mother). Godwin then remarried and brought another illegitimate stepsister, Claire Clairmont, into the family.

Whatever their rights, there was a plurality of women at 29 The Polygon, Somers Town. It was an educational advantage for Mary that the family’s penury meant most of her learning happened there. Books and radical ideas were as everyday items as breakfast – and more plentiful. Godwin never made money from his writings. As his only legitimate daughter, Mary was her father’s favourite (but not her stepmother’s) and he took unusual pains to cultivate her mind. Among a range of other subjects, he had her tutored
in Latin and Greek. Orthodox educational opinion of the time would have likened it to teaching dogs trigonometry.

In her 1831 Preface to Frankenstein, Mary recalls ‘writing stories’ from her earliest years. Godwin too wrote stories – for example, what is plausibly claimed as the first detective story in English literature, Caleb Williams (1793). Mary was a published author at the age of twelve, and she was (her father recorded) as pretty as she was intellectually precocious. Prominent thinkers and leaders of the Romantic movement made it a point to visit Godwin. The most important date in Mary’s young life was 11 November 1812 when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Harriet, who were making the de rigueur visit. Shelley, who was rich, was a financial benefactor to the ever hard-up philosopher. Over the next months he and Mary fell in love – during clandestine meetings at Wollstonecraft’s gravestone, it is romantically recorded. She was not yet sixteen, he was in his early twenties. Godwin found the relationship rather too radical, so the couple duly eloped, without permission, in July 1814 and left for Europe – currently in its pre-Waterloo lull. Shelley’s pregnant wife and child were not wanted on the trip. Shelley was no novice at this kind of escapade: Harriet Westbrook had only been sixteen when he had eloped with her to Scotland.

The product of this free-love honeymoon, the poem ‘Mont Blanc’ – and connection with Mary – marks a palpable growth in Shelley’s poetry. But they ran out of money and returned to public obloquy in September, by which time Mary was now pregnant. The child (born in February 1815) died soon after birth. Shelley had, for love, lost not merely public respect but his private wealth. However, things looked up with a handsome bequest from his grandfather and the couple retired to a comfortable house in Windsor (lyricised in Mary’s later novel, The Last Man). Their second child, William, was born in 1816 – still some months before his parents married. It was not a happy event: their marriage was only made legal by virtue of the heavily pregnant Harriet drowning herself in the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. It was a month before her decomposed body was discovered, allowing Percy and Mary to legitimise their union.

The Shelleys then took flight again. There ensued the momentous creative cauldron at Villa Diodati – the ‘league of incest’, as moralists of the time called it. Unlike her husband, who kept urging her towards rational adultery, Mary was neither a believer in free love nor Byronic recklessness. There were good examples not to be. On the way to Switzerland they were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, pregnant and abandoned by Byron. Mary was still nursing her four-month-old son. Alongside Lake Geneva, during this ‘wet ungenial summer’, the company of writers enlivened their confinement in the villa with ghost stories.

Mary – momentously – contributed Frankenstein as part of the fun. Over the next few years, the Shelleys were largely nomads in Italy where Mary, not yet twenty, gave birth to a third child, Clara. Ostensibly the Mediterranean climate was kinder to Percy’s chronically weak lungs. Italy was unkinder to little Clara’s bowels, and she died in infancy of dysentery. Mary was again pregnant while watching her daughter die and sank into profound depression. Novels were, amidst all this domestic catastrophe (Shelley was never a faithful husband), taking form in her mind and in notebooks, including the Italian set Valperga (published in 1823) and the remarkable study of father–daughter incest Mathilda. Mary’s fourth child, Percy, would, mercifully, survive. His father did not. Shelley was drowned in a squall, sailing in the Gulf of Spezia.

The young widow devoted the remainder of her life to the two Percys (her second child, William, had also died of malaria in 1819). She installed herself as the custodian of her husband’s literary legacy and, having partly reconciled herself with his family, her son’s education. Percy was destined to be the inheritor of a title and a fortune. The family insisted, using the lever of a £250 p.a. allowance, on Mary and her son returning to England, where she was unhappy and chronically lonely and he was turned into exactly the kind of Englishman his father detested. Nor were Mary’s relations with her father always good.

Mary’s financial situation eased when young Percy succeeded to the family title in 1844. She was not, however, to enjoy any happy years, dying of a brain tumour, still in her early fifties. Her radiant beauty had been wiped out by smallpox, some while before. Everything, even death and decay, happened to Mary Shelley too young.

She published novels in the 1820s and 1830s – most of them with the ‘Prince of Puffers’, Henry Colburn, for cash down and not much of it. Fiction was no longer a parlour game for her. The most interesting of Shelley’s later novels is The Last Man. The action is set in the last years of the twenty-first century. England has become a republic. The abdicated royal family figure centrally around the person of the anchorite philosopher-narrator Lionel Verney. Shelley and Byron appear under thinnest disguise. The third volume (the climax is tediously late in coming) features a worldwide plague which provokes first anarchy (the Irish make a spirited assault on Albion), then universal death to the human race. Lionel is left – a Robinson Crusoe of the future, the sole survivor of the ‘merciless sickle’. Conceptually The Last Man is, like Frankenstein, strikingly original. And, clearly enough, it allegorises Mary’s late-life loneliness. But, as a story, it is sawdust – and unimaginative. Nautical transport two centuries hence is still by sail and wars are fought with the sword. Nor, it would seem, has medicine made great progress. A stronger case can be mounted for Mathilda. The dying heroine narrates her father’s incestuous advances on her and her love for the young poet, Woodville, who is later drowned.

Is the novel (written during her deepest depression in 1818) a veiled indictment of her father? The blunt fact is that nothing Shelley wrote after Frankenstein is anywhere as good as Frankenstein. Why? The male chauvinist reply is that her husband helped her out. Without Percy she was only half a writer. So, perhaps, would he have been without her.

The feminist movement which has championed the elevation of Mary to canonical rank takes a different line. It was an enterprising woman scholar who brought Mathilda to light in 1959 – and with it the raging controversy over whether Mary was an incest survivor or not. It was the critic Ellen Moers, in 1974, who argued – persuasively – that Frankenstein should be read as
the ‘trauma of the afterbirth’. Such moments as those in Chapter 5, when Victor looks down on what he has given birth to, do not, Moers suggest, strike one as the responses of a father:

‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils … It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? Inventor’s remorse or post-natal depression?’

Extracted from Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland (Profile Books 2011)

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Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, Alice is a haunting and quietly powerful exploration of love and loss through five interconnected stories, each of which brings one woman – Alice – face to face with mortality. It was awarded the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and was published in the UK by Clerkenwell Press (an imprint of Profile Books) as their launch title in August 2011.

Geoff Mulligan, Publisher at Clerkenwell Press says: “The longlist for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was extremely strong, so I am absolutely delighted that Alice has been chosen by the jury for the shortlist. Judith Hermann is a profoundly
talented writer, and Alice is an exceptionally beautiful book about matters of some importance.”

What the judges said: These five linked stories all unfold in the shadow of death. Yet, with their pin-sharp precision and lyrical tenderness, they make you feel thrillingly alive. Exquisitely written, gracefully translated, Judith Hermann’s everyday elegies might have proved depressing – in clumsier hands. They are just the opposite. All the more precious for their transience, these glimpses of love, beauty and happiness brim with the small joys of life.

The winner eill be announced on 14^th May.

Born in Berlin in 1970, Judith Hermann is the author of The Summer House, Later and Nothing but Ghosts, which have received a number of literary awards including the Kleist Prize. Hermann is the only woman on this year’s six-strong shortlist, which includes Umberto Eco (The Prague Cemetery), Aharon Appelfeld (Blooms of Darkness), Yan Lianke (Dreams of Ding Village), Sjón (From the Mouth of the Whale), and Diego Marani (New Finnish Grammar).

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize honours the best work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom. Uniquely, it gives the winning author and translator equal status: each receives £5,000. First awarded in 1990 to Orhan Pamuk and translator Victoria Holbrook for The White Castle, the Prize ran until 1995 and was then revived in 2000 with the support of Arts Council England, who continue to fund the award. The 2011 prize was won by Santiago Rongagliolo and translator Edith Grossman for Red April.

‘impressive … redemptive and humane … [Alice] is a triumph of the novelist’s art’ Philip Hensher, Guardian

‘achingly gorgeous’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘Alice has the breadth of an epic novel condensed into five interlinking short stories which expand in small, haunting descriptions of life in the shadow of dying men. Judith Hermann is a remarkable writer’ Hugo Hamilton

Read more about the award here.

To celebrate the release of Megachange, The World in 2050 from The Economist, we are offering a lucky reader the chance to win a diverse and picturesque weekend break in fashionable Deauville, Normandy, courtesy of CityJet, the smartest choice for time-conscious business and leisure travellers.

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Visit www.cityjet.com/economist to enter.

Closing date for entires is 18^th May 2012. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions apply.

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CityJet is a European business airline with its main hub at London City Airport. During the month of April, CityJet passengers will receive exclusive MEGACHANGE samplers in flights from City Airport.

Read more about MEGACHANGE here.