What would it be like if Jane Austen and Mary Shelley sat down for tea and a lively debate? John Kessel, author of Pride and Prometheus, has a couple ideas.
‘Pride and Prometheus’ author imagines a conversation between Jane Austen and Mary Shelley
Mary vs. Jane: A Debate
by John Kessel
Although Jane Austen was old enough to be Mary Shelley’s mother, their classic works Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein were published within five years of one another. The two women writers were the inventors of, respectively, science fiction and the modern novel of manners.
Mary Godwin Shelley and Jane Austen came from very different backgrounds. Jane was the daughter of a small-town clergyman, raised in polite British society. Though she did not enjoy wealth, she cared about the strictures of society and what was and was not proper behavior.
Mary Godwin was the daughter of two famous radicals; her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was against marriage on principle and wrote one of the first arguments for women’s equality, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; her father William Godwin was a supporter of the French Revolution. When Mary was 17, she ran off with the poet Percy Shelley, who abandoned his wife and son to do so.
Jane was (at least in part) a moralist; Mary was a romantic. But as women writing in an early 1800s British society, where the freedoms even women of property and breeding had were tightly constricted, they had things in common: both used their intellect and ambition to make their way in this not always sympathetic world.
Pride and Prometheus author John Kessel imagines what the two might have said to one another had they ever met.
THE CONVERSATION
Jane: I am pleased to meet you at last, Mrs. Shelley. I have not had a chance to comment on your novel, since I died a few months before Frankenstein was published, and I gather that you also have been dead now for over 150 years. Now that’s I’ve had the chance to read it I must say that I’m afraid that Frankenstein strikes me as a series of nightmarish improbabilities, so wild that they make Mrs. Radcliff’s gothics seem like an afternoon in the parlor. The characters might as well be dreaming given their bizarre behavior. Shouldn’t a novel be about ordinary life, people to whom the reader may relate, whose actions are those that anyone might understand, and whose problems are the problems that might actually happen—and do happen—every day in England? Yours seems to me to be pure escapism.
Mary: I see that, like your Lizzy Bennet, you are not afraid to express your judgments. But escapism? There are many sorts of escape. Generations of your readers have swooned over Mr. Darcy, waiting for the perfect match that awaits them in some place that only superficially resembles the real world. At least my books are about more than who gets the husband with the biggest bank account. A novel should be about the ideal, the strange, the exceptional. It should show us things we have never seen before, things that reveal our fundamental natures and our place in the universe. It should lift off the top of your head and stir your brains about.
Jane: It is certainly true that my characters spend little time taking off the tops of each other’s heads and stirring brains about. Your story is exceptional in that way. But don’t you worry that the exceptional teaches only the obvious? Because of his ugliness, your monster is rejected by all who see him. But this is obvious, is it not? Most rejections in the real world are subtle. I would suggest that there is more savagery in my drawing rooms and card parties than in your characters pursuing each other over mountains and ice floes.
Mary: Then why do your characters accept such evils? I write to protest, to make plain human inhumanity. In Mansfield Park, your character Fanny Price is snubbed because her father is a drunken sailor and she has no money. Your clueless Mary Bennet is rejected for her plainness and her awkward egotism. Your clueless Miss Bates is left to wither into spinsterhood and genteel poverty.
Fanny escapes by marrying a clergyman, but the others sink without a trace, as if they deserve their abandonment. Society, the church, and the courts in your novels do little to save them.
Jane: I do not believe in blowing things to pieces. If not for society there would be nothing to restrain us from being as bad as the characters of your novel, who pursue their impulses to destruction. The church and the courts are all that stand between us and chaos. I wish to show how, even within polite society, evil is done every day, quietly, subtly, by people who say they serve the “right.” Those who follow only the impulses of their hearts do terrible damage to everyone around them, and do not see, or ignore, those that they have hurt.
I find the things you write about tedious.
Mary: Your books may point out the moral failings of individuals, but they accept a class system, and restrictions on women’s freedom, that need to be blown to pieces. Where are the servants, farmers, tradesmen on which your wealthy characters’ prosperity rests? In your books they are invisible! There will never be justice as long as we accept the vast gulfs between the comfortable and the poor, the ceaseless preying on the vulnerable by the rich, the institutions of church and crown and propriety. What is your propriety but a mask? I want to tear that mask away, to expose the inhumanity beneath to healing sunlight. I want men and women to see beyond the surface to the soul, and to treat each other with equality and freedom, following the impulses of their hearts.
I find the things you write about tedious.
Jane: My characters dress better, have better posture, and are funnier. Yours stand in storms on the top of glaciers and rant.
Mary: At least mine get out more. They act on their feelings. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and her mother spend a hundred pages wondering whether or not Willoughby has proposed to Marianne and never think to ASK her! You can’t let them ask her because then the story would be over.
Jane: Elinor and her mother could not imagine that Marianne would give herself away without exacting a promise from Willoughby. As for acting, every time the monster is about to do some dire thing, your Victor Frankenstein faints dead away. The monster threatens to be with him on his wedding night, so what does Victor do? He gets married! When he proposes to Elizabeth, who has been waiting for years without any explanation, he says he will reveal his horrible secret the day after they marry! And she marries him! You can be sure that Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood would ask a few more questions.
Mary: You can’t twist a plot without skating over some thin ice. We both do it.
Jane: You’re right, we do. But I don’t think your running off with a married man, father of a child, at the age of seventeen, in the company of Lord Byron, the most notorious libertine in Britain, was the act of a sensible person. It troubles me to see you put yourself so much at risk—worse than my Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park. If one of my characters were to behave in that way, she would come to ruin, and ruin her family in the bargain.
Mary: I take your point about putting myself at risk. I was very young, and in love. It proved to be no picnic. I had six pregnancies, one ending in miscarriage, one in a daughter born prematurely who died soon after. I gave birth to four full-term children; all but one of them died by the age of three. My husband Percy flitted off chasing his poetic fancies and other women, and drowned in a foolish boating accident. After his death, in the effort to support myself and my surviving son, I lived by my pen.
Jane: I cannot imagine how hard that must have been. But I would not have written about characters like Lydia Bennet if I did not see the attractions of that life of passion, even if I disapproved. I never married and had no children. I had an offer, and I said yes, but thought better of it and turned him down the next day. I was right to do so. He was large and dull and without conversation, and when he did speak he was devoid of tact. So instead I lived with my sister and supported myself with my pen.
Mary: My favorite pastime as a child was writing stories. Frankenstein was published when I wasn’t yet 20.
Jane: My favorite pastime as a child was writing stories. I started when I was twelve. I finished First Impressions—you know it as Pride and Prejudice—when I was 21.
Mary: It’s a hard life for a woman author, isn’t it.
Jane: I couldn’t even put my name on my first novel. The title page said “by a Lady.”
Mary: Neither could I. But I didn’t even get the “Lady.” Most people thought Percy wrote Frankenstein. There are even critics today who argue that Percy wrote it.
Jane: Men.
Mary: Men.
Jane: Well, I take some comfort from the Janeites. They are all over my books. They dress well.
Mary: My fans call themselves goths. They dress well, too. And here’s the thing, Jane: at least we’re still read, which is more than can be said for Percy and his pal Byron, unless they’re read by university undergrads forced to by some syllabus. They had little use for the likes of us lady writers.
Jane (sighs): Word. Shall we make some tea?
Mary: Put some cognac in it.
About ‘Pride and Prometheus’
Pride and Prejudice meets Frankenstein as Mary Bennet falls for the enigmatic Victor Frankenstein and befriends his monstrous Creature in this clever fusion of two popular classics.
Threatened with destruction unless he fashions a wife for his Creature, Victor Frankenstein travels to England where he meets Mary and Kitty Bennet, the remaining unmarried sisters of the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice. As Mary and Victor become increasingly attracted to each other, the Creature looks on impatiently, waiting for his bride. But where will Victor find a female body from which to create the monster’s mate?
Meanwhile, the awkward Mary hopes that Victor will save her from approaching spinsterhood while wondering what dark secret he is keeping from her.
Pride and Prometheus fuses the gothic horror of Mary Shelley with the Regency romance of Jane Austen in an exciting novel that combines two age-old stories in a fresh and startling way.