Final Reckonings

Charlotte Gordon closes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein back on Walton's ship, where the story has been all along. Frankenstein dies, Walton turns for home, and the creature gets the last word. Gordon notices what's new: for the first time there's no Frankenstein, and the creature is free, grown up, no longer the abandoned son. He says he's going off to die, but she isn't sure he does.

Then she turns to Margaret, the sister we never hear directly. It's her idea to stop the mission, where Victor, dying, urged Walton on. Gordon spells out the initials, Margaret Walton S., Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and calls her Mary's alter ego and a hint of the five novels to come, in which the women grow stronger until they take center stage. The book's lesson, as Gordon puts it, is about creators of every kind, parents most of all: it's not enough to make something, you have to nurture it. She ends on the verdict she gives to Mary: monsters are of our own making.