Our Hideous Progeny

There is something romantic about feeding a predator from the palm of your hand, I think- a creature which might bite you if it chooses, but chooses not to. But how does one turn such awful beauty to lead and ink on a page?

Perhaps I am meant to drown after all. But if I do, then at least it will have been by my own hand.

Do little boys ever grow out of being fools, I wonder? Or do they simply grow into something worse?

We shall steal fire from the heavens, and I shall not repent, even for one minute- for what sort of God would condemn us to such a cold world without it? We are merely taking what should have been ours from the beginning.

I suppose that is why it often makes me sad to read about history, or even natural history, as you do; I cannot help but think of everyone whose tale cannot fit in one book, those poor creatures who remain lost or forgotten. Do you think that one day, some Mary of the future will sketch our bones and wonder what we might have been in life?

So if you like her, if she strikes a chord, this one goes out to you: the angry women, the threatening women, the solitary and the abhorred; women with cold hearts and sharp tongues, who play with fire and fall in love with monsters; women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now. We shall be monsters, you and I.

Every man is Shakespeare when he’s the only one in London with a pen.

It is a terrible thing to cause pain to something you love, even if it is for its own good – and a more terrible thing still when you cannot be sure you are doing any good at all.

if there exists a way to respond to condolences that does not feel like ripping open the stitches of a wound with one’s teeth, I have not yet found it.

Of course, it mattered; perhaps the knowledge would not help to build bridges or make new medicines, but that was not all that science was about. Science was about the truth, about knowing what was possible and what was not; it was about the fervor I had felt looking upon the beached whale, or the fossil tooth in Catherine's palm. I had spent my whole life since in service to that same longing: the ravenous beast that was curiosity.

One thing was certain: we had done it now, snatched fire from the gods, stolen it down to Earth - and it was only a matter of time before we began to burn.

This country . . . this empire . . . is a ship, Miss Brown. It is hard enough to stage a mutiny from the deck, but if one starts in the water, well . . . One cannot afford principles, if one is trying not to drown.

I will always hold dear to my heart that fact that I was the first to see those golden eyes open, to see its reptilian pupils narrow and focus on my own- for in those eyes I saw, for the first time, proof that we had created something truly alive.

We had built here, in this half-ruined boat house on the edge of the Moray Firth, a temple to our own strange gods- to Chemistry and Anatomy and Electricity.

He had known war. And war was the most civilized form of murder there was.

What must it be like, do you think, to run about saying whatever one likes, as so many gentlemen do? To have one’s flaws and misdeeds attributed not to one’s sex, or the manner of one’s birth, but to one’s character alone? I should like that, I think; to make an utter fool of myself, and be regarded not as a bad example of womanhood, but merely a bad example.

I could think of nothing I wanted more in that moment than to be cold, to be alone, to have the reason for all my life's miseries laid out before me, a killable thing.

How utterly, reprehensibly unfair it was that after all this time I still bore the marks, his fingerprints pressed into me like candle wax, while he went on unburnt.

I know precisely what you mean, when you speak of legacy. Death is one thing, but death in the minds of everyone you once knew – the death of your name, your reputation – is another matter entirely.

Shame breeds fear, and fear breeds goodness, morality, better behaviour. Such is the hope. Except that sometimes – as I can attest – shame and fear beget only anger instead.

It was from this that Mary Elizabeth Frankenstein was born. So if you like her, if she strikes a chord, this one goes out to you: the angry women, the threatening women, the solitary and the abhorred; women with cold hearts and sharp tongues, who play with fire and fall in love with monsters; women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now. We shall be monsters, you and I.

There is a precise moment which everyone who has ever drawn or sewn or sculpted a thing will recognize, and that is the moment at which it becomes the thing it was meant to be. For hours, one’s work may look only like lines upon a page; for days, like a pile of fabric; for months, a misshapen rock. And then, one day, when one holds it up to the light and takes a single step back – there it is! The myriad pieces come together into a coherent whole.

And I could attest to how, in the confused aftermath of grief, the mind longed for something, someone, to blame.

Mary herself is named for three real-life Marys: Mary Shelley, of course; Mary Anning, expert fossil-hunter and self-taught palaeontologist; and the celebrated mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville, so-called ‘Queen of Science’ of the nineteenth century.

I had forgotten one crucial thing, I realized. He had known war. And war was the most civilized form of murder there was.