Outcasts

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
(1797-1851)

Posthumous miniature (c. 1857)

by Reginald Easton.

National Portrait Gallery, London.

Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley
© 2016 by Sarah Stegall

A note on the edition cited throughout:
Except where noted, all quotations are from the first edition of
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
, published in 1818. Though the 1831 edition, heavily revised by Mary, is more commonly known, the concern in this novel is with the story Mary began in 1816.

Cover image: “The Creature,” line drawing by William Blake, 1791.

All images used in
Outcasts
are in the public domain in the United States: 1. All were first published outside the United States. 2. All were first published before 1978 without complying with U.S. copyright formalities. 3. All were in the public domain in their home country on the URAA date.

ISBN: 978-1-60940-516-8 (paperback original)

E-books:

ePub: 978-1-60940-517-5

Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-518-2

Library PDF: 978-1-60940-519-9

Wings Press

627 E. Guenther

San Antonio, Texas 78210

Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805

On-line catalogue and ordering:

www.wingspress.com

Wings Press books are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group •
www.ipgbook.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stegall, Sarah.

Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley / Sarah Stegall. Historical fiction.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-60940-516-8 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-517-5 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-518-2 (Mobipocket ebook) --ISBN 978-1-60940-519-9 (pdf ebook)

1. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851--Fiction. 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein. 3. Romanticism--England--History--19th century--Fiction. 4. England--Social life and customs--19th century--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Biographical. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

PS3619.T4478 O94 2016

813/.6--dc23

2016004202

The publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting
Frankenstein
for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question so very frequently asked me: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?”

—Introduction to
Frankenstein, or,
The Modern Prometheus,
1831 Edition

C
ontext is everything.
Countless works have explored the scientific and historical roots of one of the most enduring and influential novels ever written, but few of them have explored the psychological or emotional roots of
Frankenstein
. We know about the science of the time, the advances in chemistry and biology, the raging debates on mesmerism, vitalism, magnetism, the fascination with electricity. We know about the social revolutions that accompanied the political revolutions in America and France, movements that fired Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her cohorts with ideas about perfectibility. But it is not 18th century science that has kept the book in print for 200 years, but rather the profound insight into human nature that the Creature, and even Victor, present us with.

Victor Frankenstein has been depicted as a rogue, a mad scientist, or a colossal fool. I think Mary Shelley saw him as a deadbeat dad, a man who usurped unto himself not the prerogative of God, but the role of woman, and attempted to create life. But having done so, he rejects his Creature, abandoning it and trying to run away. One need not look far to discover the well of frustration, longing and alienation from which a high-spirited
eighteen-year-old author drew what she later called her “horrid progeny.” There was the cold and distant father who rejected her, the society which spurned her for her lifestyle, her sister's lover, who deserted his child. There was her brilliant and eccentric lover, who had turned his back on convention and society as it turned its back on him. As romantic as their lifestyle may have seemed to Mary, it must have dawned on her that there were flaws in their paradise of equals.

When we think of 1816, many of us think of Regency romances, Jane Austen, the end of the long Napoleonic Wars. The Regency was soon followed by the stricter Victorian Age, with its repression, conventionality, and hypocrisy. Mary and her friends were, if anything, the hippies of 1816. Free love, radical politics, and the rejection of conventional religion characterized their every choice. Fiercely rebelling against the increasingly repressive establishment culture, Mary, Shelley and their friends sought a refuge in the democratic republic of Switzerland, there to live in communal sexual and political freedom, for at least a few weeks.

But it was not the sunny refuge they longed for.

In fact, 1816 was the “Year Without a Summer.” The lingering atmospheric effects of the explosion of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia brought on the coldest summer in European memory. It was the beginning of a three-year climate catastrophe that led to massive crop failures and widespread famine. While Mary and her friends confronted the realities of a lifestyle at odds with convention, sorting out the sexual politics of living against the grain, the weather was nothing but terrific thunderstorms, fiery sunsets, and dark, stormy nights. On such a night, by a deep, dark lake while the thunder rolled like the voice of doom, the idea of
Frankenstein
was born.

—Sarah Stegall

In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit.

—Frankenstein,
Volume I,
Chapter III

S
mall and quiet
, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin stood at the window overlooking Lake Geneva, called by some Lake Leman, and looked out over the misty afternoon. Here and there, sunlight shafted through a break in the clouds, picking out a wave top, a soaring bird, even a fleeting glimpse of Geneva across the water. White sails bellying in the breeze, a small boat bounced over a wave, came about slightly to the left, and passed beyond her view.

It was not them.

She sighed. Shelley and his friend, Lord Byron, had left that morning to cross the lake to Geneva; it was now mid-afternoon. Even this brief separation from Shelley made her anxious and restless.