We are very fortunate to have a guest blogger with us today! Roseanne Montillo is the author of The Lady and Her Monsters, about the fascinating history of the real life occultists and mad scientist that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. How cool is that?? It hits shelves February 5th, but you can get a sneak peek here. Now without further ado….Ms. Montillo.
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Libraries, and most especially librarians, have always played an integral part in my life, shaping me as a person and as a writer. They have redefined not only my views of what it means to be a creative writer, but of where creativity rests and the many ways in which to find it.
As a young student, I was told that inspiration came in various forms. Sometimes it was in the rain, especially if there was thunder and lightening. That's where Mary Shelley found hers. According to the story, in 1816 she traveled to Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others. A thunderstorm forced them indoors most evenings, where they shared ghoulish stories. One such night, Mary bolted upright from her bed and came face to face with her creations, Victor Frankenstein and his fiend.
As a child, I found the story romantic and hopeful. Imagine, Frankenstein the product of a storm. But as I grew older hoping to be a writer, I suspected there was more to it. As a high school student I worked in my school library, which I considered akin to a spiritual temple. Though I still hoped for a similar strike of inspiration that had hit Mary Shelley, I had a feeling that all the books held in that edifice had not come about by that process, and the librarians assured me as much.
I worked for my first college library and then some specialized ones, including one called the Transportation Library. You wouldn't think the history of the railroad system in Massachusetts and New England would be so interesting and fascinating, but it is. The Library at the Department of Public Health proved to be more ghoulish than the previous ones, but not less interesting.
As time passed, library jobs took a backseat to teaching and writing, though the skills I had learned as a library assistant became indispensable.
In December 2008, I was hired by Emerson College, my Alma Mater, to teach a course titled Forbidden Knowledge. The course traced man's desire to acquire knowledge – and the potential consequences such knowledge could have not only on the individual but also on humanity.
I remember the day The Lady and Her Monsters began to take shape. I had allotted a week and a half to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in addition re-reading the text, but I focused on Shelley’s introduction, in which she “explains” how Frankenstein came to be.
One short paragraph caught my attention: "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token to such things; perhaps the component part of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth."
There was none of the romance I remembered; if anything, the book was dark, mournful, somber, oozing with grief. But more than that, why would a teenager want to reanimate the dead? Why would she give any thought to the manufacturing of a body, and where had she heard of this possibility? It didn't take long for me to figure out that these questions, and their answers, would form the bases for my lectures.
As time passed, I relied heavily on the skills I had learned while working in the various libraries, for what followed were trips to libraries and archives, the scouring of long-forgotten manuscripts, connections with experts, and hundreds of emails. The result is a book full of long-forgotten alchemists coming back to life; the dead and the living; murderous body-snatchers who sold corpses for a pint of beer; and a brilliant author whose weaving together of science, history, and literature gave the world the best example of what could happen if one embarks blindly and naively into the alluring world of forbidden knowledge.
– Roseanne Montillo.
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Thank you so much for sharing with us!
– Annie