Mary Shelley by Daniel Casanave & David Vandermeulen
Mary Shelley is the genre-bending, hallucinatory conclusion to the two-part comic biography Shelley by David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave. It picks up the history of Romantic poet Percy Shelley and teenage Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft in 1814 as the couple depart England for the continent with Mary’s sister Claire Clairmont - later a lover of luscious-lipped Lord Byron.
“Our adventure into the unknown begins here, girls!” quips Percy on the docks, surveying the ships with nothing more than spontaneity to guide him. As with the first instalment, Percy is portrayed as equally sympathetic and repellent: an adulterer and financial leech, yet brimming with infectious joie de vivre.
Travelling by mule, they journey towards Paris and later to lakeshore Villa Diodati in Switzerland where one stormy night Lord Byron challenges the house-guests to write ghost stories: an evening’s entertainment which not only sparks Frankenstein but the modern vampire novel as well.
Curiously, physician John Polidori is given over twenty panels in which to thrill his breathless companions with The Vampyre, yet when Mary stands to read Frankenstein she is immediately silenced and the biography instead veers from history and plunges into the fiction of Mary Shelley’s 1826-novel The Last Man. In a mind-bending Möbius-strip, Mary henceforth represents her hero Lionel Verney who was originally based on Mary herself - and she tramps through Europe and beyond widowed and woebegone as the last woman on the planet, the only apparent human survivor of a devastating plague.
At around 75 pages, Mary Shelley is a quick, lighthearted amuse-bouche. It is neither a comprehensive literary biography, nor a graphic novel - but it may prompt you to read her travel writing or other novels - and this is, I think, its intention.
This volume is preceded by Percy Shelley, chronicling Percy’s escapades between 1811 and 1814.
Many thanks to Europe Comics and NetGalley for the advanced reading copy.
Details
Title: Mary Shelley, vol. 2 of Shelley by David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave
Published by Europe Comics, 2019
ISBN: 9791032808085
Translated from French by James Hogan
Genre: comic, humour, literary biography, biography, history, historical humour
Edition: Ebook
