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
Authors have examined and investigated Percy Bysshe Shelley's scientific knowledge and experimentation, his two Gothic horror novels published in 1810 and 1811, his atheistic worldview, his antipathy to church and state, his 1818 Preface to "Frankenstein", and his connection to the secret anti-Catholic organization, the Illuminati. These revelations showed that the novel was based on Shelley's life, background, his readings such as John Milton's "Paradise Lost", "Ruins of Empires" (1791) by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, which also informed "Ozymandias", also published in 1818, Sir Humphry Davy's "Elements of Chemical Philosophy" (1812), a textbook which Percy Bysshe Shelley owned, and the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, whom Shelley had earlier cited as a major influence in "Queen Mab" (1813), his views on religion, his poetic style, and his themes and ideas. In letters to William Godwin, Shelley also mentioned his affinity for Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and Heinrich Agrippa, "some of the physiological writers of Germany" cited in his 1818 Preface to "Frankenstein". The conclusion was that the novel has more to do with Shelley than to Mary, based on its science, its style, its imagery, its poetry, and its language.