The Creature Speaks

For five chapters the creature tells his own story, and Charlotte Gordon argues these are the best pages Mary Shelley ever wrote: plain, patient sentences from the only being in the novel who notices the happy earth. He learns words, fire, and family through a chink in a cottage wall. He also learns what the world does to strangers. Gordon reads the village stoning as reportage on what England did to unwed mothers, finds the Vindication smuggled into the cottage lessons, and then springs the trap the whole book was built for. It ends at a door.