The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, in which the author argues that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of "Frankenstein" (1818), that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love". Lauritsen maintains that handwriting cannot be used to determine the actual author of "Frankenstein". His work received positive reviews in gay publications. However, some commentators in other publications rejected Lauritsen's views and supported the conventional view that "Frankenstein" was written by Mary Shelley.
Frankenstein authorship question
The next public challenge to Mary Shelley's authorship was in 1824 in a review of her follow-up novel in the British literary magazine "Knight’s Quarterly Review", published and edited by Charles Knight. In the section “Frankenstein”, the reviewer wrote that the two books were by two different authors:
"[T]here is not the slightest trace of the same hand -- instead of the rapidity and enthusiastic energy which hurries you forward in "Frankenstein", every thing is cold, crude, inconsecutive, and wearisome; -- not one flash of imagination, not one spark of passion -- opening it as I did, with eager expectation, it must indeed have been bad for me after toiling a week to send the book back without having finished the first volume. This induced me to read "Frankenstein" again -- for I thought I must have been strangely mistaken in my original judgment. So far, however, from this, a second reading has confirmed it. I think "Frankenstein" possesses extreme power, and displays capabilities such as I did hope would have produced far different things from Castruccio. ... But whence arises the extreme inferiority of "Valperga"? I can account for it only by supposing that Shelley wrote the first, though it was attributed to his wife, -- and that she really wrote the last. … It has much of his poetry and vigour … At all events, the difference of the two books is very remarkable."