Duncan Wu

Piecing it All Together

Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

By

Bloomsbury 304pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein

By

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.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'One of the reasons for its longevity is that it has virtually nothing to say about science and technology at all,… ,
    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    • Thirty-two years ago this month, we published Muriel Spark's short story, 'A Playhouse Called Remarkable' Read it… ,
    • Time travel, bicycles and white horses populate @WomackPhilip's roundup of children's books by @marcussedgwick,… ,
    Follow Us