Book Review: Death And The Sisters by Heather Redmond

The tangled relationships between poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his eventual wife Mary and her step-sister Jane Clairmont have fascinated gossips for centuries, in large part due to Mary’s enduring legacy, the seminal horror novel Frankenstein. Written when she was only nineteen during an infamous summer the trio spent in Switzerland, the book continues to inspire countless reinterpretations, often leading readers to the complicated story, too, behind its conception.

Heather Redmond goes even further than that, reimagining Mary and Jane’s lives as teenage girls just getting to know and fall in love with the larger than life poet whose patronage was essential to their household. Percy ran in the same atheist circles as William Godwin, Mary’s publisher father, and had a substantial estate behind him. His promises of funds made him a welcome figure at the Godwin’s table, in their apartments over the bookstore where Mary and Jane (and their older sister Fanny) often toiled for their parents. He was not, alas, the best guest, taking liberties in many ways, including in his descriptions of his valiant struggles against being murdered in his own home. As Jane narrates:

Shelley pulled a pencil from his pocket and drew a dreadful demonic figure on the tablecloth, ignoring Mamma’s look of horror. “I advised all to retire in the end, thinking it impossible a wounded man would revisit the house that night. I had some notion he had, however temporarily, lost the use of his arm.”

 

“He had a gun, not a knife,” Mary said. “Unlike Mr. Campbell’s killer.”

 

I laced my fingers together over my heaving chest. “How likely is it that there are two murderers in Shelley’s life, Mary? I ask you. This was last year. Surely the man could have obtained knives by now.”

Murder is not usually the conversational topic of choice in many early 19th century English households, but the Godwins and their guest can be forgiven their macabre preoccupation. Only a short while earlier, a man was found violently stabbed in their bookstore. The girls, finding him in the night, had feared that it was actually their beloved Percy who had been murdered. Once that misconception was allayed, their thoughts turned quickly to whether someone had actually wanted him and not the unfortunate Mr. Campbell dead. A much more cynical Bow Street thinks Percy might have had a hand in the murder himself, leading Mary and Jane to investigate in an effort to save not only this man they’re obsessed with, but also the funding their father desperately needs to keep their household afloat.

There are twists and turns aplenty in this well-researched book about the teenage years of two women who would have an outsized impact on modern fiction. Both girls are honestly pretty terrible—there’s a lot of pettiness and fatphobia and just downright immaturity in these pages—but Ms. Redmond takes pains to remind readers that our heroines are only sixteen and living in difficult, if not outright unhappy, circumstances. Her greater trick is in laying a thoughtful psychological foundation for the facts we know to be true as the girls get older and find their lives even more entangled with Shelley’s than either ever imagined.

But perhaps Ms. Redmond’s most impressive feat with this book is in making Jane such a sympathetic character. Often considered hysterical and headstrong, the Jane of these pages is utterly justified in her choices:

My feet started north without me really deciding my path. I wanted as far away from the prisons as I could manage, this perious, stinking, death-dealing neighborhood. How could Mamma have brought us here, tied our fates so completely to the Godwins and Skinner Street? Was our life before them really so bad? I scarcely remembered a time before Mary, but I wished I could. Something separate, something mine. She had Shelley’s regard; I could see it. What did I have?

 

“I am me,” I said, my own little war cry. I would follow my own drum. Even if it had to take me down paths all by myself.

The real life story of Mary Shelley and Jane Clairmont is turbulent and thrilling, as is Ms. Redmond’s depiction of their youth, with a (fictional) murder mystery thrown into the mix for good measure. The bonds of sisterhood that would last throughout the lives of these very different young women are exceptionally showcased. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how those bonds continue to grow and be tested in future novels, as the characters they inspired sleuth together to bring more killers to justice.