Frankenstein

 I don't know how it happened, but somehow I began reading the 1818 text of Frankenstein and that is where I am at the moment. I'd like to reread Miranda Seymour's bio of Mary Shelley and maybe a couple of others, one about her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I've been suffering from a mean little virus and could not do much else but lie in bed, sleep and read. Outside commentary and appendixes and all, Frankenstein is around 200 pages. It seemed like a good fit for this time of year. I have not read the 1818 text in over twenty years, I do believe. Maybe more, I don't know. I know what started it. I watched the film Mary Shelley! What a horrible mess that was. I suppose it would be all right for a teenager who wanted to get interested in Mary Shelley but it was really a terrible film. I was shocked. I loved all the actors, they were fine, but the script and the story was just silly in more ways than I can recount. Perhaps it was fine to boost Mary Shelley and her book, but at the expense of Percy and Claire, I think not. Not even Mary Shelley would have approved, well, the Mary Shelley that Percy loved. It's hard for me to talk about Mary Shelley, because I have the greatest sympathy for her, wish all her work read and all that, but I don't think we need to make her out to be something she was not. She had a hard time, no doubt, with her headaches, her nerves, her depressions and dealing with being the widow and all. 

Anyway, I have all her books, have read her, admire her but I love Percy Shelley and I love Claire and I don't know why so many scholars fall into separate camps. It's such a waste of brain work.