By Kate Travis
If the makers of Downton Abbey want to capitalize on the popularity of costume dramas, they might look for their next Lady Mary in Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley’s life needs no embellishment, complete with preposterous plots and love triangles set in an era of intense scientific curiosity about the human body. In this biography, Montillo explores how the science of that time inspired Shelley’s work.
In her 1831 update of Frankenstein, Shelley wrote that the story she had penned 15 years earlier emerged from a summer telling ghost stories on Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. Montillo paints a more detailed picture of the book’sorigins.