Mary's Creature

There's a passage, where the creature, alone in that hovel, teaches himself to read, piecing together language from castoff books he finds discarded like bones in a ditch. Paradise Lost, of all things, teaching a motherless being what it means to be cast out of grace.

It's the loneliest classroom in literature, and yet it's also, if you squint at it right, a hymn to the very thing we are each doing right now. Learning, self-taught, half in the dark, hungry— for what, we do not yet know.

A nineteen-year-old girl wrote Frankenstein, during a summer without sunlight—1816, the sky choked with volcanic ash from Tambora on the other side of the world, and a houseful of poets daring each other to write ghost stories by candlelight because there was nothing better to do in the gloom. That detail alone always rearranges how I read the whole book. Creation born from darkness, quite literally.

—One really ought not to read old monster stories before going to bed!

:-)