What is Catherine Reef reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Catherine Reef, author of Mary Shelley: The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein's Creator.

Her entry begins:

I recently read Mark Ford’s Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner, which opens with an incident worthy of Mary Shelley. It seems that when Hardy died, in 1928, there was a tussle over his body. Hardy had requested burial in Stinsford Churchyard, alongside his rural Dorset family and his first wife, Emma Gifford Hardy. But his literary executor successfully lobbied for a resting place in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, a tribute that Florence Dugdale Hardy, the writer’s widow, was inclined to accept. To act in keeping with Hardy’s wishes yet allow the nation to honor him in its manner most fitting, a compromise was reached: the writer’s heart was removed from his chest and buried at Stinsford; the rest of his body was then cremated and deposited at Poets’ Corner.

Ford had my attention, and he held it to the end, as he used the lenses of biography and criticism to reveal a way of looking at Thomas Hardy. Ford’s Hardy was someone with rural, working-class roots who was changed by exposure to city life.

The son of a builder, Hardy left Dorset and went to London in 1862, at twenty-one, to be an architect’s apprentice. In his off hours he adhered to a rigorous program of self-education, visiting galleries and museums, reading demanding texts, attending concerts and the theater, and writing poetry. He had literary ambitions, but after failing to find success as a poet, in 1867 he returned to Dorset, determined to...[read on]

About Mary Shelley, from the publisher:

On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history.

The story of Frankenstein’s creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself. Mary ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen. It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad scientist who brought a corpse back to life. Success soon followed for Mary, but also great tragedy and misfortune.

Catherine Reef brings this passionate woman, brilliant writer, and forgotten feminist into crisp focus, detailing a life that was remarkable both before and after the publication of her iconic masterpiece.

Visit Catherine Reef's website.

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--Marshal Zeringue