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There’s a breathless energy to this novel that celebrates real-life figures in all their genius and flaws
It’s remarkable that Mary Shelley was only 20 years old when Frankenstein was published. The daughter of 18th-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she was surrounded by books all her life but also by disappointment.
Her husband was a philanderer, she suffered from depression and her future work was overshadowed by the incredible success of her debut. Martina Devlin’s engrossing novel explores a period in 1819 when the Shelleys were living in Rome with Mary’s stepsister Claire, who had a child with Lord Byron and was now Shelley’s mistress. If this sounds like the summer from hell, add Amelia Curran, an Irish painter, into the mix, who finds their commune simultaneously repugnant and fascinating.
Devlin does a terrific job at describing the claustrophobic tensions that surround the quartet. Shelley believes in “free love”, Claire is persuaded to the idea, Mary is forced to put up with it, while Amelia observes in disapproval. Each becomes interested in the historical story of Beatrice Cenci, who was executed for revealing her father’s incestuous and sexually abusive relationship with her. The two writers are drawn to telling her story while Amelia wants to paint her image.
A clash of three art forms – poetry, prose and painting – then ensues, along with a competitive feeling over who might represent Beatrice’s story best. And when Lord Byron himself swans into Rome in his gilded carriage, it’s fair to say that matters grow even more complicated. Glorious Monsters represents the third volume of Martina Devlin’s informal trilogy about female writers.
The first centred on Edith Sommerville during the early 1920s while the second explored the romantic life of Charlotte Brontë. This is a worthy addition to that sequence, presenting Mary Shelley in such a rounded fashion – creative, frustrated, in love, in despair – that one reaches the end feeling the urge to read all the non-Frankenstein books simply to understand her better.
Well researched, with vivid characterisation, there’s a breathless energy to this novel that celebrates the real-life figures in all their genius and all their flaws. John Boyne’s latest novel is The Weight of Angels
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