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# The Séance in the Hair Salon
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/preview/the-seance-in-the-hair-salon/
- Published: 2026-08-25T22:36:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T17:23:43.000Z
- Description: A biographer, a medium, and the key to Frankenstein.
- Author: Andrew Wessels
- Tags: Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, #preview

Charlotte Gordon is a biographer. She was stuck on her first book, a life of the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, when a friend who ran a hair salon in Gloucester mentioned a medium was coming. She went as a skeptic.

She watched people ask about dead relatives and get practical furniture advice back, and watched that advice make them sob. Then it was her turn:

> He said, I’m getting a strong feeling of neglect. Of neglect. Does that mean something to you? And it did. Because Anne Bradstreet had been minimized and dismissed for centuries. And then he said, she wants you to know it’s all right. She wants you to know it’s all right.

She finished the book. Her own verdict on what happened is careful: what she was given that afternoon wasn’t information. It was permission.

She tells the story inside her *Frankenstein* series, and it isn’t a digression. It’s her whole reading of the novel. *Frankenstein* is a book about bringing the dead back to life, what it costs, and whether you can face what you’ve made. Victor never could. Gordon has spent her career learning how.

That’s one story from Charlotte Gordon’s series on *Frankenstein*, opening this fall at [Rebind Classics](http://localhost:2368/?ref=rebindclassics.com).

## The full series

14 episodes · Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*

1. **The Lie About the Dream.** The most famous story about Frankenstein is the dream at Lake Geneva, and Charlotte Gordon opens with the evidence that it never happened, and the better question of why a young author would need to invent it.
2. **Letters from the Ice.** Gordon reads Walton's four letters as the whole novel in miniature: doubles all the way up, a story that shows its own seams, and a real, drowned ghost behind Margaret Saville, the book's first silenced woman.
3. **Fathers, Not Science.** The first science fiction novel opens with no science at all, and Gordon reads Victor's strange first pages as planted moral tags: a celebrated education with not one lesson in responsibility, built by an eighteen-year-old on purpose.

#### Show all 14 episodes

1. **Birth, Backwards.** The creation scene is a birth run deliberately backwards, and Gordon believes those were the first pages Mary Shelley ever wrote, the book growing around them as one long confession with a single refrain: not my fault.
2. **The Two Marys.** The experts insisted Mary Wollstonecraft meant nothing to her daughter; Gordon buries that theory with a girl who learned to read tracing her name on her mother's tombstone and eloped by way of the grave.
3. **Checked.** Gordon builds her case against Victor from one sentence that slips out of him like a confession, "my own vampire," while Justine's trial shows what every woman in this novel is: checked, silenced, and made to pay.
4. **Team Monster.** Gordon picks her side and says so: the real plot twist is not the creation but the abandonment, and on the sea of ice the abandoned child out-argues, out-feels, and out-parents his father.
5. **The Creature Speaks.** Gordon argues these are the best pages Mary Shelley ever wrote, plain and patient sentences from the only being who notices the happy earth, right up until the trap the whole book was built for springs, and Felix's stick lands in our hands.
6. **Greet the Stranger.** Gordon reads the creature's rage as Mary Shelley's autobiography, with Victor as the dark side of Romanticism, a movement whose free love was glorious for the men and lethal for the women, and her verdict reaches past the novel to strangers, borders, and us.
7. **The Man Who Wouldn't Marry.** Take the monster out of these chapters and what is left is a man fleeing his own wedding; Gordon reads the famous ambling tour of England as procrastination enacted as structure, with Percy Shelley posed in the prose as Henry Clerval.
8. **The Female, Destroyed.** Tearing the half-made female to pieces is not a scientist's second thoughts but a murder, Gordon argues, down to the gurgle of the basket going under, and it exposes the book's real couple: creator and creature, jealous as lovers.
9. **Her Name on It.** The claim the whole series has been building toward: Frankenstein is the Vindication of the Rights of Woman written as fiction, and the Bodleian notebooks, two hands in two colors of ink, put Mary's name on it for good.
10. **The Conjurer.** Before the finale, one episode on how it was made: Gordon researches the dead by haunting them, Mont Blanc, the bay where Percy drowned, a guest room above a morgue, a method she can date to one word from a medium in a hair salon.
11. **In Continuation.** Gordon reads the chase across the ice as the strangest courtship in literature, closes the frame on three quiet words, "Walton, in continuation," and finds the buried happy ending in a ship turning for home, before the last word goes to the creature.