“In the foreword to the 1947 edition of Mary Shelley’s collected journals, editor Frederick L. Jones complains that many of Mary’s entries are too short, too self-aware. She’s cautious, impersonal. As if it’s somehow unfair that Mary kept back some of herself, rather than filling page after page with the guileless trust that no one else would ever read them. Because clearly she knew otherwise.”
“We have for her novel a remarkable record of the strange occult dance that is the creative process; everything, that is, except the very first part, the original germ, the text that Mary wrote that summer. Of her first, original idea, her actual work from that summer in Geneva, no copies exist that I can tell, although who’s to say what someone with adequate time and access to the deep vaults of Oxford could turn up. We know where she wrote her first sketch, and who was there, and we can guess even at the when—but the product of the initial inspiration itself, the original fire, it’s missing.”