Mary Shelley by Daniel Casanave & David Vandermeulen
It’s 1814 and Romantic poet Percy Shelley and teenage Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft are departing England for the continent in the genre-bending conclusion of the two-part biography Shelley.
Luminous artwork
“Our adventure into the unknown begins here, girls!” quips Percy on the docks, surveying the ships with nothing more than spontaneity to guide him. As with the first instalment, Percy is portrayed as equally sympathetic and repellent: an adulterer and financial leech, yet brimming with infectious joie de vivre.
Travelling by mule, they journey towards Paris and later to lakeshore Villa Diodati in Switzerland where one stormy night Lord Byron challenges the house-guests to write ghost stories: an evening’s entertainment which not only sparks Frankenstein but the modern vampire novel as well.
Physician John Polidori thrills his breathless companions with The Vampyre. Then it’s Mary’s turn. She stands to read Frankenstein, but the story takes an unexpected twist here and we plunge into her 1826-novel The Last Man. In a mind-bending Möbius-strip, Mary becomes her hero Lionel Verney who was originally based on Mary herself - and she tramps through Europe and beyond, widowed and woebegone, as the last woman on the planet, the only apparent human survivor of a devastating plague.
At around 75 pages, Mary Shelley is a quick read, and may inspire the reader to explore her lesser known travel writing and other novels. This, I think, is the point.
Many thanks to Europe Comics and NetGalley for the ARC.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Percy Shelley by Daniel Casanave & David Vandermeulen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
