The Birth of Frankenstein

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 298, 9 March 1945, Page 8

The Birth of Frankenstein

3YA recording on the life of Mary Shelley might not altogether commend itself to the admirers of that strong-minded lady, since it was chiefly concerned with the inspiration she afforded to the poet Shelley in the later years of his life, rather than with her own accomplishments, of which the writing of Frankenstein is the most famous and the least known. Frankenstein, in her novel, created a being without a soul, which in natural resentment ultimately destroyed him, so that he became proverbial for the man who creates something stronger than himself. But Mary Shelley, by an irony of literature, herself suffered the same fate when Frankenstein was seized upon and made the subject of a prolonged series of unusually silly films, in which the name of Frankenstein was transferred from the creator to the creature, and all trace of the author’s original intention destroyed for ever. It is a pity, the more so as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though surpassed by Jekyll and Hyde, is an excellent work in this school ‘of the hor-ror-story and morality combined, and

tells us more about her than the subject of this broadcast-as if the poet Shelley couldn’t draw all the inspiration he needed, if not more, from any moderately sympathetic and good-looking female! 3