TRAVEL: GENEVA


hellfire if we abandon religion for the atheism inflected throughout the plot. Those less convinced say all of this is just mumbo jumbo and Mary just wanted to write a racy read. Her genius, remarkable in one


so young, and the reason Frankenstein has endured to become the most famous monster of all, despite being played by such disparate characters as Boris Karloff, tragically, in the Universal horror films of the Thirties; to Christopher Lee’s Hammer reinvention in the Fifties; through to Peter Boyle, comically, in Young Frankenstein, is the brilliant way she edges the reader’s sympathy for the creature even after its vicious murders. “Hear my tale,” the grotesque insists when he confronts his creator. “I was a poor, helpless miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.” Finally, in a heartrending plea


on realising he is ugly and an outcast, he begs Frankenstein: “Make me happy.”


Despite her fame and success,


tragedy and guilt overshadowed much of Mary’s life. She suffered


several miscarriages, only one of her four children survived, and her own mother died from an infection after the doctor reached into her uterus after Mary was born. Other circumstances undoubtedly fed into her vivid imagination. Her hated


stepmother and father moved the family to dingy lodgings near Smithfield Market where Mary was kept awake at night by the screams of slaughtered animals. The bell at nearby St Sepulchre’s tolled every time a condemned man passed by on their journey to Tyburn and Mary knew that their corpses were destined for dissection.


An oil in the National Portrait


Gallery shows Mary as a beautiful 18-year-old but her seductive looks were later ravaged by smallpox, her once beautiful face bearing further scars of grief when Shelley was drowned in a boating tragedy in Italy. Mary is buried in Bournemouth


alongside her mother and father. Her tombstone remembers her only as: Daughter of William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and widow of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley.”


A monstrous omission. n SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE 79


The statue of the Frankenstein monster in Chillon (above)


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