Reading a Novel Like a Biographer: Charlotte Gordon's Method

Charlotte Gordon does not read Frankenstein the way a critic does. She reads it the way a biographer does, as the trace of a living person, and in her Rebind Classics series she is candid about a method that borders on the uncanny. To write about the dead, she believes, you have to summon them, inhabit them, and let their voices come through yours. Reading Mary Shelley's novel, for Gordon, is an act of conjuring as much as interpretation.

Biography as Inhabitation

Gordon has written full biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, and she describes the work in language closer to acting than scholarship. When she writes about a subject, she says, she is "in character," channeling a voice so completely that she "can't stand to be interrupted." The process is one of inhabitation: to render Shelley's love for the difficult Percy, Gordon had to "inhabit Percy, too," to feel what he needed and how he suffered, even though she had begun by loathing him. The biographer's empathy, in her account, has to extend even to the people she dislikes.

This immersion is not optional, in Gordon's view; it is the only way the work can be done. "You can't make it up," she insists. "You have to be immersed in their diaries. You have to read their letters," even "go and float around where they lived." The goal is to reach a kind of contact with the subject, the feeling she calls "the chill in the bones," a sense of presence she has felt in places haunted by their history. Reading the documents closely enough, living with them long enough, is how the dead begin to speak.

The Séance and the Sanction

Gordon is disarmingly willing to describe where this method led her, including a séance. Struggling with her first book, about the neglected Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, she visited a medium on a friend's suggestion. The medium, she recounts, told her, "I'm getting a strong feeling of neglect," then saw scrolls and a strong religious presence, all of which fit Bradstreet exactly. Whatever one makes of it, the experience changed Gordon's process. She felt "seen," felt that her trespass into a dead woman's life had been sanctioned, and finished the book quickly.

That word, trespass, points to the anxiety underneath the method. Gordon is "often haunted by" the question of whether biography is an invasion, recalling Henry James's withering view of biographers as violators of privacy. Her answer is to reframe the work as restoration rather than intrusion. "My mission with someone like Mary Shelley," she says, "is to bring her back to life." She calls it "a kind of incarnation process," an effort to "resuscitate her" and "give her voice," and, most of all, to make it "her voice, not my voice." The biographer disappears so the subject can speak.

Victor's Act, Performed with Love

Gordon draws a parallel between her own work and the novel she is reading, one that turns Frankenstein into a parable about biography itself. Pressed on Victor's obsessive, self-absorbed drive to create, she admits the resemblance: "I don't think you can write the kind of books I write without the kind of obsession that Victor has with his creation." The biographer, like Victor, assembles a living presence out of dead material. The difference, in Gordon's telling, is love. Victor's work is creation without care; hers is meant to be the same act performed with devotion.

This method has a cost, which Gordon does not hide, suggesting that inhabiting Wollstonecraft and Shelley meant living inside real anguish, suicide attempts, betrayals, the deaths of children, and she describes the toll of returning to such darkened minds. Yet she also describes missing them when a project ends, the way one misses people. The immersion that makes the work possible also makes it painful, and the painfulness is, for Gordon, a sign that the contact is real, that she has actually reached the person rather than merely the text.

Gordon's method insists that the novel is not a free-floating artifact but the utterance of a specific eighteen-year-old, grieving and cast out, with her dead mother's books in her luggage. To read it well, Gordon suggests, is to keep that person in the room, to hear the life pressing up through the fiction. The biographer's task and the reader's converge: not to solve the book, but to summon the woman who wrote it.