The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein

Summary

Lauritsen argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of Frankenstein (1818), that the book "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love" or homoeroticism. Lauritsen criticizes feminists for constructing "a Mary Shelley myth, according to which she was a major literary figure, one whose genius had been overshadowed - not only by her husband, but also by the other male Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats." According to Lauritsen, Percy Bysshe Shelley did not want his authorship of Frankenstein to be known to the public, and for unknown reasons decided to attribute authorship to Mary Shelley, thus helping to begin a "hoax" that has persisted up to the present. Lauritsen maintains that revisions to Frankenstein made in 1823 and 1831 weakened the work, and that while it was ostensibly Mary Shelley who revised Frankenstein into its 1831 form, it may primarily have been revised by William Godwin.

The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein includes a favorable review of Shelley's Fiction (1998) by Phyllis Zimmerman, a book in which Zimmerman argues for Percy Bysshe Shelley's authorship of Frankenstein, and a short bibliography of books and articles about Percy Bysshe Shelley and Frankenstein. Lauritsen praises poet Edmund Blunden's Shelley: A Life Story (1946), calling it the best book about Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Reception

The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein was praised by critic Camille Paglia, who wrote in Salon.com that "Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of 'Frankenstein'...and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist." Paglia compared Lauritsen's work to that of critic Leslie Fiedler, concluding that, "This is a funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear."

Jim Herrick wrote in Gay Humanist Quarterly that Lauritsen "presents mountains of evidence, much of which is startlingly persuasive." Richard Labonte reviewed The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein in the San Francisco Bay Times. Author Douglas Sadownick reviewed The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein positively in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, writing that Lauritsen confirmed his view that Frankenstein is a gay work in the same sense in which Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" are gay works, and offered a commendable psychological analysis, and a sensitive line-by-line reading, of the work.

Feminist Germaine Greer dismissed Lauritsen's thesis in The Guardian, writing that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written Frankenstein, his argument fails because "...it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given." Lauritsen replied that Frankenstein "is a radical and disturbing work, containing some of the most beautiful prose in the English language.... a profound and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley."