Book Review: Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, translated by Laura Watkinson

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“Is love not subjugation, after all?”

📚

A gothic mystery with young love and innocence at its core, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein is a gorgeous and atmospheric blend of fiction and fact and an insightful exploration of Frankenstein’s roots and influences. The storyline unfolds via dual timelines: Lake Geneva, Europe (along the Switzerland/France border) in 1816 and Dundee, Scotland, in 1812.

The former finds 18-year-old Mary, her partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, their infant son, William, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire, as they visit Lord Byron and his physician/companion John Polidori. It’s during this legendary, rain-soaked, laudanum-infused period that Byron issues a challenge to determine who among them can write the best horror story.

The latter offers a sapphic reimagining of Mary's experience throughout her stay with the Baxter family at age 14. Her health improves as she forges a relationship with Isabella Baxter, with whom she spends time outdoors sharing ghostly, mythical, monstrous tales and experiencing formative moments both figurative and literal, imaginary and actual, untold and shared. She also encounters Isabella’s brother-in-law, Mr. Booth, whose seemingly pleasant face may hide something sinister beneath.

Filled with sumptuous prose, the narrative possesses a dream-like quality where despair underscores joy, expectation undercuts desire, and belief undermines autonomy. Love is often unequal and unrequited, while people, places, and seasons of life exist as their own stories. It’s a hazy, magical realism- and metaphor-infused examination of humans and monsters where the reader comes to understand how Mary’s experiences, feelings, surroundings, and interactions impact, inspire, and ultimately bleed over into her literary masterpiece. It’s a raw and vulnerable tale of:

• loss, longing, loneliness, and grief; 
• suffering, darkness, turmoil, and self-sacrifice;
• mortality, impermanence, finality, and futility; 
• entitlement, influence, manipulation, and control;
• promise, possibility, suspicion, and misinformation;
• fear, anger, truth, and imperfection;
• devotion, frustration, limitation, and presumption;
• inequity, roles, bonds, and binds; and
• secrets, transgressions, assumptions, and awakenings.

Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein is a beautiful, melancholy meditation on ephemerality and existence, as well as what it feels like to be a writer, to have that special, secret, powerful essence burning deep within and aching for release. One where death, as always, serves as overarching commonality and great equalizer.

🖤Amanda

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