‘Frankenstein’ Manuscript Comes to Life in New Publication
How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
Well, this is really cool! Via The New York Times.
A facsimile of Mary Shelley’s manuscript of “Frankenstein,” written when she was just 18, will be published in March by SP Books here to mark the bicentennial of the novel’s publication in 1818.
The draft version, written in two large notebooks, is full of annotations by both Mary Shelley and her future husband, Percy Shelley, showing his corrections to her spelling (“enigmatic o you pretty Pecksie!” he wrote next to her “igmmatic”) and suggested changes to vocabulary.
SP Books suggests on its website that Mary Shelley’s own revisions show that she slowly made her monster more human, changing a description of a “creature” to a “being,” replacing “fangs” with “fingers,” and making his hair (at Percy Shelley’s recommendation) a “lustrous black.”