Featured Spotlight: Amy Weldon's 'Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein'
- Sea Crow Press
- Jun 18
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 23
We are excited to present Amy Weldon, who brings us her new book, Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, drawing readers into the Gothic realm of the Romantic era. In this Q&A, she offers a glimpse into her writing process, inspirations, and what she hopes readers will gain from the book.
Amy Weldon with the Creature statute in Geneva
Creative Inspiration
What inspired you to write fiction centered around Mary Shelley and her world?
With a Ph.D in nineteenth-century British literature, I’ve long been intellectually engaged by the great Romantic writers, starting with the first generation (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake) and then moving into the second (Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats). Frankenstein began to take on a life of its own in my imagination once I began teaching it to my own students and seeing it anew through their eyes, then helping them understand the novel’s scientific and historical contexts and the fact that this was not Mary Shelley’s only novel. People often ask me when I first read Frankenstein, and I honestly can’t remember – it seems like I’ve always known it and lived inside the imaginative world it’s made. In cultural terms, of course, I have been living in that world, as have we all – nothing in our culture and its stock of general available stories and images was the same once the Creature shuddered and opened his eyes! (Guillermo Del Toro’s new film adaptation, coming this fall, is the latest in a long, long line that I posit, in my novel, as beginning with the Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema, who are inspired by the Creature himself.) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been a gift to readers and creators since its birth. As I’ll be arguing in my next book, the Romantic period’s jumpy, dreamy energies and dramatic cultural changes speak to our own moment powerfully; the Romantics never stop being relevant, and they feel more relevant than ever right now.
Amy Weldon with an early copy of Frankenstein and the cover of her own book, Creature
Was there a specific moment in her life or a piece of her writing that sparked your story?
In my writing, as described in my second book, The Writer’s Eye, I like to start with an image – a still or moving picture of a person in a place doing something – then follow where it leads by writing about it. Sometimes that image has a voice (a character’s or a general narrative voice) attached. In this case, the first image I can remember and find in my papers (from more than 10 years ago!) was of Mary Shelley as a child, writing a story that began “Once there were two sisters and a papa and a mama’s ghost.” The story was imaginary, but the child’s voice – and the mama’s ghost – ended up leading me to what’s probably the dominant image of the novel: little Mary Shelley standing on a chair to bring her face as close to her dead mother’s portrait as she can, in an effort to draw closer to her mother herself.
Amy Weldon with the original Mary Wollstonecraft portrait and at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of Mary Shelley.
How did you decide what fictional lens to use — historical fiction, speculative, gothic, etc.?
Genre and structure come with the development of the draft itself as it grows, seldom as a conscious decision at the start. As noted, I generally begin by identifying a powerful starting image, then writing about and into that image to discover what its own innate energies and sensory charge tell me that it’s trying to be. I then follow that lead all the way through the book: each book has a particular personality and energy of its own that develops organically as part of the process rather than responding to an initial plan.
Characterization & Voice
How did you go about imagining Mary Shelley as a fictional character?
A fiction writer’s first responsibility, Eudora Welty says, is to enter into reality as the character understands it. Accordingly, starting with that initial image, I “pretended to be” that child, in one part of my mind, to see through her eyes and write in her voice and point of view. That process continued all the way through the novel, as Mary Shelley grew older and her story grew along with her.
What aspects of her personality did you feel most drawn to explore or reinvent?
I really wanted to explore, from inside her reality, what it might have felt like to be her as a writer, bringing to life the serious long-term artistry and writerly self-motivation of which she was capable as well as the unpredictable bolt of inspiration (or whatever you call it) that resulted in Frankenstein. She was a 19-year-old single mother when she began that book, but all her experiences leading up to it had made her “ready to have that dream” (as Robert Penn Warren puts it.) She also had a long literary career as a writer, supporting herself and her only surviving child after Percy Shelley’s death left her a widow at 24 and until she herself died at age 53. Popular culture doesn’t often depict writers or artists with the nuance they deserve, including the ways they struggle and the ways they work, hard and consistently, over many years. Novels are born in more than just a single “Shakespeare in Love”-style montage moment.
Were there traits you amplified or reinterpreted to serve your story’s tone or theme?
Along these lines, I staged several scenes of Mary Shelley confronting the world on her own, including the scene in the publishing offices of Johnson and Hunter and the scene in which she faces down Percy Shelley’s father. I don’t think these ever actually happened, but they do animate an aspect of Mary Shelley’s personality that is real – the way she had to face real challenges, and keep going, throughout her life. Persistence is perhaps the most important trait a writer needs, and my Mary Shelley has plenty of that.
The grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Blending Fact & Fiction
How closely did you stick to historical events in your portrayal of Mary Shelley?
Pretty closely, but as my note at the end of the novel explains, I had to compress some events and characters into one (make a composite) and leave others out completely. My novel does generally follow the outline of her life story and travels as they’re known, and I try, as well, to provide markers of what’s happening in the world around her. An unexpected way I departed from the historical record was to make Percy Shelley a little less odd than he actually was (read Richard Holmes’ classic biography Shelley: The Pursuit for more) because otherwise readers would struggle to believe – even given the differences in place and time – that an intelligent sixteen-year-old girl would go anywhere with this guy. Following Holmes, I also took a position on the parentage of the child registered as Elena Adelaide Shelley in Naples, which is still an open historical question. Always, I had to be guided by the question, “What will make sense to readers, and how should I follow the logic of the story itself as it is unfolding and asking me to follow it?”
Where did you choose to take creative liberties — and why?
The inclusion of the Creature as a character in his own right (and animating “reality as he understands it” from his perspective) is perhaps the most noticeable “liberty” I took, because through the Creature’s eyes I can illustrate scenes (like Byron’s boxing with Robert Rushton at Newstead Abbey and John Keats on board the Maria Crowther in Naples) that Mary Shelley couldn’t have seen but that I really wanted to include. The invention of Madame Diodati is another – so is my own take on the famous “ghost story contest” in the Villa Diodati, which, I hope, reinforces my novel’s major through-line of Mary Shelley’s longing to connect with her long-dead mother. I hope that each creative liberty expresses emotional, if not always literal, truth.
Amy Weldon at the grave of John Keats
Themes & Symbolism
What themes in Mary Shelley’s real life did you find most compelling to explore in fiction?
See #5.
How did you weave parallels between Frankenstein and your own narrative?
I tried to include (and, in the case of the Creature and Robert Walton, give voice to) aspects of Mary Shelley’s novel that readers would recognize while also adding value to readers’ experience by offering something unique to my own book. (Plus, I had tremendous fun re/imagining familiar scenes and characters.) I hope readers enjoy my novel – and I don’t think you necessarily have to have read the original Frankenstein to be able to do so!
How do you see Mary’s life story echoing larger themes like creation, loss, identity, or rebellion?
Mary’s story (like the Creature’s, or perhaps the reader’s) is one of the oldest narratives in existence – a young person sets out into the world on their own, the baggage of family and home training (present or absent) at their backs, searching for the place they will feel beloved and belonging. (This is definitely what happens to Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost, a source text for Frankenstein and thus for my novel too.) As such, it takes readers through all these themes and more – creation, self-creation/identity, loss, and rebellion, as both Mary and the Creature search for purpose and fulfillment.
How do you see Frankenstein in relation to today’s world — in terms of technology, ethics, and human connection?
In teaching Frankenstein to college students now, I find the parallels between Victor Frankenstein and the creators of AI and social media (just to name two) undeniable, and students see them with little prompting from me. What happens when someone creates a being, or a “like” button, or an AI application and launches it into the world just because he can? As my students now see every day in their own lives – and they do see it – it usually means that the tech bro comes to occupy the position of Victor Frankenstein but they, and we – the humans nudged aside by the machine – are in a position more like the Creature’s, cast out into a world that suddenly looks threatening, unfamiliar, and insecure by forces we neither control nor understand. This past year, students and I read the novel as the tragic suicide of a young boy addicted to a chatbot hit the news, and we discussed what that situation might say about desires for companionship, a heartbreakingly and irreducibly human trait. The Creature begs Victor for a mate so that he “may enjoy the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.” All humans (and nonhumans too) seek that “interchange,” a word Mary Shelley chooses very precisely; we need to be seen and heard by one another, as well as to see and hear. One of the many sinister aspects of chatbots like character.AI is how they draw out, play upon, and then monetize that desire for companionship, creating addiction to create profit while, ironically, making the user ever lonelier in the real world. I’m talking about this at length in my next book. What does this state of things mean for companionship, justice, human (and nonhuman) flourishing? Especially since, as I wrote in my first book and Jonathan Haidt, among others, has written so well recently, current college students have been the victims of a vast technological experiment, conducted on them without their knowledge or informed consent, since social media and touchscreens have been a feature of their experience since childhood. The good news is, they are eager to push back against it and, as David Bowie sings, “quite aware of what they’re going through.”