Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge

Roaring Brook Press, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1626725003

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

After the flood of books about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley that accompanied the bicentennial of the first publication of the book last year,  despite my fascination with both, I was pretty exhausted from reading about them by the time 2019 rolled around, but Mary’s Monster is something special. This verse biography of Mary Shelley’s life is framed by imagined commentary from the Creature itself. While in a text-only format this might not have worked, nearly every page is also a visual feast, pairing Lita Judge’s free verse with incredible black-and-white watercolor illustrations, for nearly 300 pages. The powerful illustrations integrated into the text reminded me at times of A Monster Calls, but that is a fictional prose novel, while this is nonfiction– a detailed verse biography. Judge structured the book into nine parts, to represent the nine months it took Mary to finish writing Frankenstein, and also the same length as a pregnancy. Mary’s thoughts about creation, love, abandonment, despair, and destruction were central to her identity, and she certainly dealt with all of these issues in her own life, from the death of her mother in giving birth and difficult childhood, to her intense relationship with Percy Shelley and her own pregnancy.

In introducing her, the Creature presents her as a complex character, outspoken and imaginative, and commands us to “hear her voice”. Indeed, even though they are not necessarily all direct quotes, the poems in the book are all told from Mary’s point of view, and Judge has pages of notes at the end identifying where she found individual lines. We hear Mary’s voice as shaped by Judge’s perceptions, choices, and words. Through Part 7, we get a relatively straightforward narrative of Mary’s life from childhood through the summer at the Villa Diodati, during which she started writing Frankenstein.  Part 8 starts with the suicides of her half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife Harriet and expresses her intense grief over their deaths and the early death of her first daughter in a nightmarish, Goya-esque collage of her internal turmoil, the responses of the very tangible Creature she creates, and the way the two of them are twisted together: he claiming “I am your creature,” and her return revelation, “My creature is me!”

This is not a light read. Mary Shelley’s life was intense, passionate, and difficult, and while Judge doesn’t go into the details, she doesn’t shy away from writing about sexual relationships, suicide, children dying, drug use, and bad reputation (as opposed to a recent children’s book that described Mary visiting the Villa Diodati with “her dear friend Percy Shelley”).  Judge omits any mention of Mary’s wedding to Shelley after Harriet’s suicide, which is, to me, a confusing thing to leave out, although I will grant that it wouldn’t have contributed well to the flow of Part 8, which is focused on Mary’s anger and grief (Judge explains her reasoning in an author’s note). In addition to an author’s note and the notes on the poems, Judge also provides additional information about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein following the book’s initial publication; thumbnail descriptions of the lives of major characters and family members, such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron; a list of books that Mary had read, according to her journal; and a bibilography. It’s not everything you want to know about Mary Shelley, but it’s a great place to start. Mary’s Monster is a breathtaking look at Mary Shelley’s younger years (Part 9 ends in 1823, and she lived until 1851), and, although it is targeted at YA audiences, I highly recommend it as a unique title that does an outstanding job of melding poetry, biography, art, and literary criticism into a powerful, magnetic, visually compelling, and well-researched story.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski