with commentary by Charlotte Gordon
Everyone knows Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in a dream. Her biographer has read the notebooks.
From Episode 1 of fourteen, Charlotte Gordon on Frankenstein. Listen to the whole episode: The Lie About the Dream →
Let's see who can write the scariest ghost story that seems to be true. Mary tells us that story later. And so they all do start writing, and Percy gets bored and goes back to writing about, you know, Percy, and Byron gets bored and goes back to writing about Byron. But Mary starts writing and doesn't stop. And this is where we get Frankenstein from. Many years later, she will tell a story that isn't true. She will say, I struggled to come up with the story of Frankenstein. And she will say, until I had a dream, I didn't know what I was going to write. But there's no evidence to support this at all. All of the people who were there, who were huge diary keepers, do not record that Mary had any trouble starting to write. And if you look at her notebooks, which are in the Bodleian, there's no evidence of stopping and starting or not knowing what to do. And so the sort of working theory that her biographers have is that she tells the story that Frankenstein came to me in a dream many years after, in 1831, after everybody is dead except for Claire. And she tells it because she's been called monstrous for writing this book. And so she has to distance herself, you know, from being the author of this monster. It's monstrous to have created this monstrosity. So, what a clever thing to say, that it came to me in a dream. And I think we've talked about this before. If you say that you have a dream and you're Romantic, you're also saying I'm special. Dreams only visit special people. So she's saying two things at once. It's not my fault that I came up with Frankenstein, and it came to me in a dream because I'm a genius.
Charlotte Gordon wrote the double biography of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and she opens her fourteen episodes on Frankenstein with the story everyone half-knows: a rained-out summer on Lake Geneva in 1816, Lord Byron's ghost-story contest, and a dream. The contest happened. The dream is another matter, and the notebooks are where Gordon goes to check.
The clip ends on what the dream story bought her. The episode goes on to what Gordon is really here to say: that she once thought this book was dumb, what changed her mind, and why an eighteen-year-old who was supposed to be writing a marriage plot was writing about life, death, and the difference between men and gods instead. She also tells you how she came to Mary Shelley in the first place: a canon with no women in it, and two teachers she names.
Listen to the whole episode: The Lie About the Dream →
Fourteen episodes. Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for members.