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I have a favourite Kate Beaton strip framed up in our book room:


(Full-size image .)

Mary was � what? � eighteen years old when she went on this famous holiday to Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron and Byron's physician. She was calling herself ‘Mrs Shelley�, though they had not yet married � Percy was still married to someone else.

The surroundings were familiar. The last time Mary and Percy had come to Switzerland had been during their elopement a couple of years earlier, accompanied by her sister, who was also in love with him; Mary had got pregnant, but the baby girl was born prematurely and died in February 1815. Now they were back, trying to put the past behind them and enjoy a holiday with Byron, who at the time was sleeping with Mary's stepsister. Percy's first wife would soon be out of the picture, found drowned in the Serpentine in an ‘advanced state of pregnancy� before the year was out. Mary's other sister Fanny also drowned herself that year, 1816, also pining for Percy.

So it was in the midst of this complex love-dodecahedron that the holidaymakers, their festive plans foiled by constant rain, held their famous competition to write a ghost story. The result is something very different from its image in popular culture. Instead of the smoke of Victorian London, we have the Swiss Alps and the Orkney Islands; instead of Igor and bolts through the neck, we have meditations on personal autonomy, scientific responsibility and eugenics.

Frankenstein is overwritten and the narrative structure is a bit odd � she was still a teenager when she wrote it, let's not forget � but thematically, it's fascinating. I'm surprised by how few reviews I've read touch on what seems to me to be the intensely female experiences that it obliquely comments on. The confusion of bringing a creature into the world only to feel horror and revulsion towards it. The stress of releasing it into a hostile and uncaring world. And perhaps most of all, the deep sympathy shown with someone who feels that their body is not their own, that it is somehow owned and regulated by others. A body that one is taught by society to hate. The monster's feelings are unimportant, because he was created by a man for the man's own gratification.

Mary quotes her beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley, unattributively, when Dr Frankenstein first spots his creature up on the Mer de Glace. She uses the final two stanzas from ‘Mutability�. For me though it's the beautiful first stanza that better expresses the ferocious intensity of Mary and her circle of friends and lovers, surrounded as they all seemed to be by imminent, premature death:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
    Night closes round, and they are lost forever�

As they all were. But the writing they left behind will last as long as English literature is read, and for all of its problems Frankenstein is among that select group.