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 novel was first attributed to Percy Bysshe Shelley in an 1818 review by Walter Scott who recognized Shelley's style and ideas in the Preface and noticed Shelley's poem "Mutability" and poetry passages and citations in the book. Shelley had, indeed, written the Preface, "Mutability", and selected the poetry passages, such as the John Milton epigraph, but these facts were not known at that time. Scott concluded that it was "an extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination".