The Life of Mary Shelley

Charlotte Gordon pauses after the first volume of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to tell the story behind its first-written sentence: "It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed." It's 1816, Geneva, Byron at the Villa Diodati, rain for days, and a challenge to write the scariest ghost story. Polidori produces "The Vampyre"; Byron and Percy drift back to other work; Mary strikes gold. Gordon then maps the tale's dates, December to September, onto Mary's own conception, birth, and her mother's death.

The turn comes with the second edition sixteen years later. Gordon says there's no evidence for Mary's claim that the story came in a dream after a struggle; the notebooks show fluency and speed. Her explanation is one word, twice: survival. A woman writer needed readers to believe she couldn't have thought this up alone. Buried under the modesty, Gordon argues, is a prouder claim: a dream vision was the mark of a true Romantic artist. Volume Two, she promises, turns everything upside down.