Antoinette May

With echoes of her deceased mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s avant garde feminism undergirding the narrative, Mary Godwin Shelley emerges from “The Determined Heart” as a heroine ahead of her time. Her unconventional love affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley marks a pivotal turning point in her young life, and what follows leads to myriad highs and lows and generates her crowning achievement, “Frankenstein.” Populated by characters both legendary and mundane, this story draws readers into show more a world that is in many ways reflective of contemporary society, and although it is a work of historical fiction, it nevertheless imparts a stimulating view of classic literature and the lives of those who composed it, tempestuous relationships and all. Short chapters and a continuous pace make this a relatively quick read, as well. show less

I first read Frankenstein in college. It was for a class in popular fiction from pre-Victorian times onward. Of course, prior to actually reading it, I was pretty certain I knew all about the tale, so ingrained it is in our own pop culture collective. So it was fascinating to see that it was so very different from what I had thought. And as a physical manifestation of a terrifying and desperate mental state, it was that much scarier than I ever expected. Between Frankenstein and Dracula, it show more was a rough semester for me. But if it was hard to read the novel because of the nightmares it inspired, I remained completely fascinated by Mary Shelley and the origins of the book. The Determined Heart, Antoinette May's fictionalization of Mary Shelley's personal life and how it contributed to her creation of her dark monster, is an engrossing read that fleshes out what I already knew about the author and her tale.

Mary Shelley, daughter of the famous and notorious Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, was intelligent, strong, determined, and destined to write. Although her mother died only days after her birth, young Mary is raised to know her as an amazing, progressive woman, at least until her father remarries. Her stepmother dislikes Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny, and makes Mary's life unpleasant, denying her many things that she claims are too expensive. She supplies these same denied things to her own daughter, Claire, despite the impoverished state of the Godwin family. Mary's growing up years are very much a Cinderella story, with her father loathe to anger his wife by supporting his intelligent daughter. After the family moves to London, setting up their press on a squalid street, William Godwin finds a potential investor in the young Percy Bysshe Shelly. His introduction of Bysshe into their home changes everything. Fanny, Mary, and Claire all fall for the young poet, despite the fact that he is married. He, in turn, falls for Mary, convincing her to elope with him to Europe after her father's enraged denial of their love despite his famous scorn for traditional marriage. They leave behind an apoplectic Godwin, Bysshe's pregnant wife, and his young daughter.

But it's not just Bysshe and Mary heading to the Continent, Mary's scheming stepsister Claire accompanies them as well. Their actions provoke a scandal but Bysshe and Mary are in love and determined to weather anything. Their life together is one of penury and hardship, constant moving, and tragedy after tragedy. Bysshe is continually unfaithful, even having an affair with Claire, and he comes across as needy and selfish. Mary is unaccountably devoted to him, bearing (and burying) his children, enduring the hardships and scorn of their chosen life, and putting his own intellectual life ahead of hers, albeit sometimes grudgingly. Mary is clearly faced with the uneasy dichotomy of the times between life as a model wife and that of a strong woman author. The literary luminaries of the time pass in and out of their lives and it is, of course, Lord Byron who, during a lengthy storm, challenges Mary to write the ghost story that becomes her most famous work, Frankenstein.

Mary's character is both frustrating and heartbreaking. She desires love and family but she gets Bysshe, who refuses to remain true, and her father, who disowns her but still comes knocking on her husband's door for monetary infusions that the small Shelly family, estranged from Bysshe's purse string controlling grandfather, can ill afford. Despite the high minded beliefs of the men around her, Mary is not valued as she should be simply because of her sex. And she refuses to assert herself for the recognition due her. Stepsister Claire is an odious character who again and again highlights Mary's inability to challenge for what she wants and deserves. May has used the facts of Shelly's life to weave this well researched and engrossing novel about the author. Reading about the darkness and heartbreak in her own life, it is not hard to see where she could create a tale like Frankenstein, a tale of monsters, loneliness, and rejection. The novel focuses mainly on Shelly's life with Bysshe, wrapping up quickly after his untimely death, and some of the repeated details (repeated because Bysshe does the same thing over and over) could have been left out without significantly altering the reader's feelings of empathy for Mary and her situation. But over all, the novel is quite a quick read, one that elaborates well on the popular, but rarely detailed, specifics of the famed author's life. Readers curious about Shelly, her place in the pantheon of Romantic Poets, and the origins of her enduring and disturbing novel will find much to think about here. show less

Frankenstein would be the result of Mary Shelley’s creativity. But, that would not come until several years later. The focus of this novel is the life of Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors in their own right. Mary Wollstonecraft was an early feminist, and many hated her outspoken manner. But, Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after Mary’s birth, leaving William Godwin to raise two young girls, his stepdaughter Frances (Fanny) Imlay, and Mary. show more When Mary was four, he remarried Jane Clairmont who had two children of her own.

Money from the sale of William’s books was rapidly declining and times were financially burdensome for the family. They moved to London where Jane had the idea to open a book store. Mary’s first impression of Skinner Street was “… worse than anything she could have imagined. Offal and blood from the Smithfield Slaughterhouse had been left to putrefy in open gutters, and every kind of trash littered the road.”

As Mary matured, she met and fell head over heels in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was already married and could not part from his wife, Harriet, and so they left together to form their own illegitimate union. Her step sister, Claire, went with them. Soon he was intimate with Claire, cheating on Mary as he had cheated on Harriet. Yet her love for him remained unusually strong.

This is a very gripping historical fiction novel set in the early 19th century. In the author’s note, Antoinette May explains, “Dates and incidents have sometimes been slightly altered in the interests of presenting Mary’s life in its true, totality.” I loved how the story enveloped ‘shadows’ of things that would stimulate Mary’s later writing of Frankenstein. For instance, as a young girl, she’d sneak behind a sofa and listen to her father and his friends. One evening, scientist Anthony Carlisle told about experiments being conducted on executed prisoners. He said, “…tonight we finally succeeded in passing electricity through the corpse of one of them. Can you believe—the poor creature actually moved!” Rating: 4 out of 5. show less

This is a biographical novel of the life of Mary Shelley, focusing around her relationship and marriage with Percy Shelley, and her literary development, centred around the genesis of Frankenstein, but extending to her next few novels as well, which are little read today, though they should be better known (most of them were out of print until recent decades). This novel is a real page turner, easily made so by the colourful, scandalous and tragic incidents in the lives of the two main show more protagonists and their associates, especially of course, the notorious Lord Byron. Including Mary's own mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father William Godwin, the collective impact of this group of talented individuals on the literary, social and political life of the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was considerable, though it didn't last. The suicides of Percy's first wife Harriet and of Mary's half sister Fan, and the successive deaths of Mary's children are shocking, the latter deaths reminding the reader about the devastating effects of infant mortality before modern medicine. A great read and an eye opener on a whole literary period. show less