Love, Sex, and Frankenstein: A Novel by Caroline Lea

genre: historical fiction

This past summer I learned the amazing fact that the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, early American philosopher and women's rights advocate, is Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. It felt so powerful to me, the idea that having a mom who saw the world with such clarity could possibly have had an impact on this girl and her famous story.  When we meet the woman who will become Mary Shelley, she is already the lover of poet, Percy Shelley, and has had his child. She’s living in poverty and is scraping by not only in a very literal sense but also intellectually and emotionally. She is adrift and scrambling so hard for love that she is constantly betraying herself in the strange love triangle she finds herself in as both a stepsister and the lover of a man who is already married.

Mary’s desperate need to process her life in writing is constantly undermined by the people around her and by that little voice inside her telling her that that she is not good enough.  Not only is this book a retelling of what let up to the book Frankenstein being written, but it is also about the power of female rage. It is about a woman's brain being being so focused on making everyone everyone around her happy that she can literally forget who she even is. It’s about what can happen to a person who chooses to live beyond that place.  This book is about childhood trauma and the act of creation and about how creating can change us.  It is also about betrayal and forgiveness, and, most, especially, about realizing that living up to our own expectations of our ourselves is more important than pleasing anyone else. The word "sex" in the title is less about the act (although there is that) but more about "sex" as gender and a woman having her blinders removed to the reality of how her gender has been used as a vice to control her and keep her small.   It is lush and painfully sad and gorgeous and atmospheric, and I loved it.