"There’s more to Mary Shelley than Frankenstein": this was how Dr Andrew McInnes concluded his talk at Bradford’s Festival Hub. He divided his slides into four main themes: Goth Queen; Mother of Science Fiction; Queer Ally; Contemporary.
He cited a range of evidence to suggest how Mary (1797-1851) was a Goth before Goths were invented. One rumour is that she and her poetic-genius partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, made love on the grave of Mary’s equally famous mother, feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft. McInnes argued that, though this may be true, the term "make love" in the eighteenth century did not necessarily mean to f***.
The Mother of Science Fiction section mainly drew on the novel The Last Man (1826). Mary imagined a fast-travelling world, where London to Edinburgh would take two hours in a hot air balloon. It is a small mercy that she never lived to see the reality of modern train travel.
McInnes backed up his description of his subject as a queer ally mainly with reference to her helping Isabella Robinson and the transgressive Walter Sholto Douglas, in 1827, acquire fake passports and live lives of superficial conformity, in Europe.
Mary’s attitude to the east and the Muslim world was, McInnes acknowledged, one that didn’t necessarily paint her in such a liberal light. He referred to the way that the non-Christian world was often the original source of strife in her fiction, for example the plague in The Last Man. Even the most forward-thinking individuals still absorb the attitudes of their era.
Audience questions covered topics including Mary’s world view, how the Shelleys financed their lifestyle, Lord Byron and Orientalism, and finally, a view of American sitcom, The Munsters, as an alternative 1960s existence for Frankenstein’s Monster.
McInnes is Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University. He certainly did justice to his subject and her difficult but "creatively engaging life."
David Keyworth was born in West Bromwich but grew up in North Lincolnshire. He was awarded a New Poets Bursary by the Northern Writers’ Awards, 2013. His debut pamphlet, The Twilight Shift, is published by Wild Pressed. He has completed a poem-sequence called Death and Taxis, which he’d like to include in another pamphlet. He also writes for the Weekend Notes.
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