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
English literature scholars Phyllis Zimmerman, Phillip Wade, Stephen C. Behrendt, and Johnathan Glance compared the two early Shelley Gothic horror novels "Zastrozzi" (1810) and "St. Irvyne" (1811) with "Frankenstein" and found them to be precursors of the latter novel, containing the same or similar ideas, themes, structure, plot, and characters. Zastrozzi is a novel of pursuit and revenge where an atheist antagonist seeks to destroy his victim and his progeny. He can kill his victim at any time, but instead seeks to torture and slowly kill his victim by destroying and killing everything he loves. In "St. Irvyne", the plot centers around an alchemist, Ginotti, who has a lifelong goal to find the secret of life by the study of "natural philosophy", to attain immortality. It is also a plot of pursuit where the alchemist seeks to impart the secret of eternal life to Wolfstein, the protagonist. There is even a poem in "St. Irvyne" on the reanimation of a corpse, the nun Rosa. Both novels rely extensively on John Milton's "Paradise Lost", containing epigraphs like in "Frankenstein", and contain poetry intertwined throughout the novel, a distinctive feature of "Frankenstein" as well. These novels were also published anonymously.