Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

[danlo]

[lurch]

Just a side note on this subject...During interviews of Mel Brooks, the subject of his movie " Frankenstein" always comes up and he always gets in, " Frankenstein is actually a story of "Womb Envy"..Usually it gets a laff, but with the background provided here, I can see Brooks may have a valid point. Shelley turned her painful experience into a sad fiction.

[deer of the dawn]

I read it once a while back. I thought that most of it is thought-provoking, but there were some stretches that were outright boring. That dang Charles Dickens - whom I detest - got everyone stretching out their novels with a lot of filler.

Hate to disagree, wf, but what you are calling "filler" was the discursive style that went back much earlier than Dickens. Read any Austen? Hawthorne? Melville? A lot of space was given to thinking and talking over philosophical implications, personal ramifications, etc. That was considered part of the book, and maybe people felt ripped off if a story moved too fast. Nowadays if a hero or heroine stops to breathe or pee, people get bored.

I thought Frankenstein was pretty short, almost a novella. But then my husband teases me that I buy my books by the pound.