Saturday, October 18, 2014

My hero / Mary Shelley by Neil Gaiman

Mary Shelley

My hero: Mary Shelley by Neil Gaiman

Gothic fiction had been all the rage for some time, but Shelley's Frankenstein still changed everything

Neil Gaiman
Saturday 18 October 2014


Detail of the very first illustration of Frankenstein and his creature, by Theodor von Holst, published in 1831. Photograph: The British Library Board

The cold, wet summer of 1816, a night of ghost stories and a challenge allowed a young woman to delineate the darkness, and give us a way of looking at the world.
They were in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva: Lord Byron – the bestselling poet, too dangerous for the drawing rooms of England and in exile; his doctor, John William Polidori; Percy Shelley, poet and atheist, and his soon-to-be wife, 18-year-old Mary Shelley. Ghost stories were read, and then Byron challenged everyone in the group to come up with a new story. He started, but did not finish, one about vampires; Polidori completed "The Vampyre"; and young Mary, already the mother of a living child and a dead one, imagined a story about a man who fabricated a living creature, a monster, and brought it to life. The book she wrote over the following year, initially published anonymously, was Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, and it slowly changed everything.
Ideas happen when the time is right for them. The ground had been prepared. Gothic fiction had been all the rage for some time: dark, driven men had wandered the corridors of their ancestral homes, finding secret passages and dead relatives, magical, miserable, occasionally immortal; while the questing urge of science had discovered that frogs could twitch and spasm, after death, when current was applied, and, in an era of change, so much more was waiting to be discovered.
Brian Aldiss points to Frankenstein as the first work of science fiction (which he defines as hubris clobbered by nemesis) and he may be right. It was the place where people learned we could bring life back from death, but a dark and dangerous and untamable form of life, one that would, in the end, turn on us and harm us. That idea, the crossbreeding of the gothic and the scientific romance, was released from into the world, and would become a key metaphor for our times. The glittering promise of science, offering life and miracles, and the nameless creature in the shadows, monster and miracle all in one, back from the dead, needing knowledge and love but able, in the end, only to destroy … it was Mary Shelley's gift to us, and we would be infinitely poorer without it.

THE GUARDIAN



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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