Poor Creatures, by Mairi Kidd review: 'the girl behind Frankenstein'
This engrossing novel takes a subtle approach to charting the formative years of Mary Shelley, writes David Robinson
According to Wikipedia, there are 430 films based on Mary Shelley’s most famous novel – a list that runs right up to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which was given a small-scale cinema release last week and is on Netflix in a fortnight. In interviews, del Toro has said that the main reason he wanted to film the novel was “because it is the quintessential teenage book ... written by a teenage girl”.
He’s right: Shelley’s novel - started when she was 18 and finished a year later - contains multitudes: scientific discovery, exploration, revenge, revolution, kidnapping, mental breakdown, serial killing, horror, compassion, romance, a very gothic travelogue and a whole bundle of philosophical and moral ideas. On top of all that, not only is Frankenstein the first science fiction novel but it can indeed also be read as an exposition on outsiderdom, rebellion, and all manner of other alienated thoughts bubbling up inside the teenage bedroom.
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What kind of teenager was Mary Godwin (or Mary Shelley as she became after marriage)? That in itself has been the subject of quite a few films, but they invariably concentrate on that sunless summer of 1816, when a small group including her lover and soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley and his friend Lord Byron, holed up in rented houses by Lake Geneva, held that famous informal competition to come up with the scariest story.
Mairi Kidd’s well-researched and engrossing novel moves their lives back four years. The 14-year-old Mary has been sent by her father, the radical political philosopher William Godwin, to spend the summer with the large family of his friend, William Thomas Baxter, in Dundee. When she arrives, seasick and suffering from a mysterious ailment, she is befriended by the Baxters’ 17-year-old daughter Isabel, who shares a room with her as well as an ambition to write stories.
There’s something about Mary, but as yet we don’t know what. That’s what we read to find out, what the final twist reveals, and what the back cover promises - to “bring the girl behind Frankenstein out from the monster’s shadow”.
The main fear, for those of us in awe of Mary Shelley’s genius, is that this will be done either retrospectively or with a clunky, join-the-dots linkage between experience and imagination. Mercifully, this doesn’t happen. When Mary is taken by the Baxters on a voyage to Orkney or is scared by the sight of a doll’s face looking oddly lifelike in a lightning storm, nothing is made of it, just as when Isabel decides to write a Gaelic legend told them by their Highlander Nanny about a headless creature from the monster’s point of view. The only linkage is in the reader’s mind: slowly, subtly, but completely in the background, the outline of Shelley’s masterpiece is forming.
Equally gradually, the novel’s focus starts to change. At the start, Isabel is in awe of the sickly southern visitor with her intellectually intimidating family (Mary’s mother, the revolutionary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died just 11 days after giving birth to her) but gradually she takes centre stage herself. By the end, when Mary refuses to accept even the slightest amount of guilt over the suicide of Harriet, Shelley’s first wife, that process has become complete.
In the afterword, Kidd notes that although so much of the rest of Mary Shelley’s later life is chronicled in detail in several sources, the Dundee years are a relative blank. Yet to my mind, these are the most successful parts of the novel: the sisterly rivalries and fallings-out among the Baxter girls are well handled, as is Isabel’s marriage to a man previously married to her elder sister.
Although the Wollstonecraft/Godwin/Shelley side of the story is much better sourced, it has both more drama and less narrative coherence. And while that may be just a quirky irony - that’s real life for you - it does make me wonder what kind of novel Mairi Kidd would write if she cut a few more historical strings.
Poor Creatures, by Mairi Kidd, Black & White, £16.99
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