Duncan Wu
Piecing it All Together
Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
By Kathryn Harkup
Bloomsbury 304pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
By Fiona Sampson
Profile Books 304pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils’: the line runs too deep in the marrow to be dismissed as mere cliché, as if it echoes some long-forgotten incantation. Yet it was composed a mere two centuries ago, occurring at the beginning of an everyday tale of DIY resurrection and psychic disintegration, written by an eighteen-year-old girl who had eloped to the Continent with her lover, a flaxen-haired, anaemic, shrill-voiced hooligan called Bysshe.
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