Mary Shelley in Tuscany - Of Light and Electrics

Scutt, Jocelynne (2021) Mary Shelley in Tuscany - Of Light and Electrics. Synergies: A Journal of English Literatures and Cultures. ISSN 2785-1850

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Abstract

From Bagni di Lucca, where residing with husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley wrote lyrically in her description of the Tuscan light. Yet light intruded into her Tuscany writing in less benign ways. Frankenstein, Shelley’s most acclaimed novel, was sketched in Geneva in its earliest drafts, the first complete revision undertaken in England, in March, 1817. Yet some ten years later, her writing found a source of energy that drew her further into the mind of Frankenstein, her scientific exploration of a doctor determined to play God. Tuscany generated in Mary Shelley a renewed intellectual energy, for the electrical storms that came with the climate stirred the rhythm of her writing. Her cerebral exploration centred in the power that lay in lightning and its aftermath, as it shot through the skies and ended in thunderclaps auguring danger. Against the backdrop of a Tuscan landscape Shelley, a woman steeped in scientific exploration, shaped her imaginary ogre, a creation never given a name but made by the man Frankenstein. Energised by clapping thunder, skies shattered by the light that lit the hills, the novel was reworked and rewritten, to be published anew. This second version of the fiction, Frankenstein, was fashioned in a Tuscan terrain, generating an English novel once more set to set the world alight.

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