You mean "creation of adolescents" don't you?

Wouldn't surprise me. Shakespeare's a fraud too; the man never saw anything out of Avon and he was uneducated. As is Homer, blind and illiterate as he was.

Still, mythology is important in a culture, and this takes on a sort of mythological quality. The same goes for the West, in my opinion. Every Western is historically inaccurate, but that doesn't take away from their mythological merit in our society. The same goes for Mary Shelly. And if her husband did pass on his name on the work, then he wanted to see his wife succeed, and did a remarkable thing for women back in the day, and we should celebrate it in that respect as well.

i'm so confused.

firstly, a vastly shorter life expectancy means you're an adult much earlier in life. in mozart's day people were getting married at 12 and 13 sometimes which would make 10 years old an analog to about today's 14 or 15. a prodigy, certainly, but by no means absurd.

second, mozart was given intense instruction from a very early age (3) by his father who was a leading music teacher in europe at the time.

third, mozart had ZERO distractions. no tv, no video games, no interweb, no cars - which means your world is much smaller...travel was brutally difficult and not undertaken lightly in those days. all means he just sat around day-in and day-out playing, learning, and composing music.

we have analogs in our time, look at gymnasts. their lives, similar to mozart's, are driven by an unbelievable dedication to their sport so that they excel at the topmost level by their early teens (when their bodies are best suited to it)

so...take anyone with a natural talent for some activity, remove all distractions, remove the "adolescent" years (ie. you go directly from child to adult at about 13/14 or so), and give them intense instruction by one of the world's leading teachers every single day...i daresay you'll end up with a child prodigy on your hands.

yeah yeah, i know everything happened much earlier back then (marriage, etc) and there was no myspace and all. like i said, adolescence is probably largely to blame.

and yes, i'm also aware that we have such child prodigies today, like the top gymnasts. my remark was mostly about how incredible it is--i daresay even more today, what with the distractions and all.

Dr. Frankenstein, you know, created the monster.

I'm pretty sure the argument that their life expectancy was shorter is a fallacy.

While the average life span in the 1800s was certainly much lower than it is today (at least in the first world), those numbers are skewed by very high infant mortality rates. People in the 1800s (and even in antiquity) routinely lived to ages that are common today, especially amongst the upper class, to which the Shelley's belonged.

Ironically, both of them DID die young -- Mary of a brain tumor, and Percy of drowning -- but these kinds of deaths are and were, of course, exceptions to the norm.

I don't think any young people of Mary Shelley's generation were motivated towards creativity at a young age out of fear of an early death, because they had no reason to expect one.

She wasn't just an uneducated 19 year old. Her mother was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Women"; her father, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, famous for "An Enquiry concerning Political Justice".

As a young girl, Godwin encouraged Mary to take part in philosophical debates, and ensured that she had an excellent education, even though she never went to a conventional school. She was part of an intellectual circle that included Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as Shelley and Byron. She published her first poem at 11, and went on to write many novels - though none as successful as Frankenstein.

So why is it inconceivable that this talented young woman could write a ground-breaking novel? It had to be written by her husband ... I've heard this line before somewhere!

Ken Russell make a really great film about that night in Byron's castle, and the supernatural incidents that it entails: Gothic, with Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron, and Timothy Spall as Polidori. Really eerie, disturbing flick--highly recommended.

As I understand it, Homer being blind is a myth. The statues of him had no pupils or irises, but they were meant to be painted.

For my part, I'm certainly not saying that Mary Shelley was stupid or unintelligent (nor do I automatically believe Lauritsen's hypothesis), which is why I said "Marginally educated" and not "uneducated." For the record, Wollstonecraft was dead before Shelley was a month old. For the times, Shelley was certainly better-educated than most women.

It's not success of the subsequent novels that is the question, it's their merit. There are few scholars who find anything in Mary Shelley's post-Frankenstein history that approaches her masterpiece.

At first glance, it does seem like that is a valid response, but it seems that Lauritsen has done more that simply say "her husband wrote it, because he must have" and instead looks at particular turns of phrase that occur in Percy's other writings.

Again, I don't necessarily buy the argument, but it is an interesting one.

Oh, let her have it, jeez.

The notion that a person could write one *singular* piece, and that not do much else doesn't seem that impossible to swallow. Lots of people are defined by one *great* work, and a series of other lesser pieces. There are even modern examples, like Harper Lee.

Also, can I say, that nothing makes me roll my eyes more than "independent scholars sticking it to the establishment." I never got that. First, academics aren't just people with opinions who yell a lot. There are standards of evidence that matter, preferably driven by a theory. So an "aberration" in the available data is not the same thing as proving everyone else wrong - it needs to stand up to existing theories and counter-evidence.

Also, this notion that academics just bury people that disagree with them always strikes me as a bit odd. People who are just flat out wrong, and have terrible methods/bad inferences *do* get it handed to them. But someone who can come up a brand new, unorthodox idea with *powerful evidence* coupled with *good theory and methods* - that person probably gets a really nice job.

Often, when writing a dissertation, people want counterintuitive results, b/c that gets attention. The problem is people just drop in on an academic disciplines, acting like their random bits of facts strung together inherently meet the rigorous standards of academic work. And when academics dismiss it is as the hooey it often is, the "victim" cries about stodgy intellectual elitism, not realizing it's just shitty work.

...while I don't debate this point, neither is this exactly definitive. One hit wonders are the norm, are they not?

Of course a man wrote it, its a classic of 19th century literature, not a delicious thanksgiving dinner.

No this isnt a family guy reference what are you talking about...

Conversely while I was never enraptured by Mary SHelly, I loved Percys work, especially Ozymandias. Few poems have such poignant messages about human endeavor.