#BlogTour-‘Arguing With The Dead’ by Alex Nye

About the book..

The year is 1839, and Mary Shelley – the woman who wrote Frankenstein – is living alone in a tiny cottage on the banks of the river Thames in Putney.

As she sorts through the snowstorm of her husband’s scattered papers she is reminded of their past: the half-ruined villas in Italy, the stormy relationship with Shelley and her stepsister Claire, the loss of her children, the attempted kidnapping of Claire’s daughter Allegra from a prison-like convent in Florence.

And finally, her husband’s drowning on the Gulf of Spezia as they stayed in a grim-looking fortress overlooking the sea. What she has never confided in anyone is that she has always been haunted by Shelley’s drowned first wife, Harriet, who would come to visit her in the night as she slept with her two tiny children in a vast abandoned villa while Shelley was away litigating with lawyers.

Did Mary pay the ultimate price for loving Shelley? Who will Harriet come for next?  

Massive thanks to Kelly at Love Books Group blogtours for the chance to read and review ‘Arguing With The Dead’ A lifelong obsession with Mary Shelley means I will immediately be intrigued anytime a new book is released about ‘Frankenstein’or it’s creator.Mary created science fiction at the age of 17! How can this never not be incredible?

So how do you take a story which is so deeply embedded in the public conciousness and put your own twist on it?

You take the Alex Nye route and do it with aplomb by centering Mary.

She is often sidelined in her own tale, whether because of her involvement in the Romantic Movement or because of ‘Frankenstein’-in much the same way as The Creature has become synonymous with the name of his maker, you rarely read about Mary without Shelley and Byron making an appearance and taking over.

This ingenious take has Mary living impoverished and under constrained conditions from her former father in law. He has agreed to pay support to her for her son Percy under the condition that she will not publish any writing or he will halve her income each time she does.

Instead, she is reduced to editing and tidying her husband, Percy Shelley’s poems and notes for publishing.

”I am proud to be an independent single woman,fighting as my mother did in a world of powerful men to maintain the memory of those I loved-my mother, my husband,trying to ensure the future of my son.This is the story I tell myself.”

As well as making Mary the focus of this novel, so another figure cruelly neglected to a side note in history steps forward from the shadows, that of Percy’s first wife Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in the Serpentine after Percy and Mary eloped.

This is one of many ghosts who haunt Mary, she is both the chornicler of the lost and ghostly as well as living with them. And as she herself says of her step-mother Mary-Jane Clairmont-

”A dead loved-one held dominion over us all,and no one living could replace her.Mrs Clairmont-my poor stepmothe-had yet to learn this.You cannot argue with the dead.”

This book is an immaculately researched and superbly written account of Mary’s life which, as her real life did, did not end with the death of her husband. It throws light onto the years afterwards and I was surprised to learn how much of a hand Mary had in the editing of Percy’s work, post humously.It makes me want to return to the source material and read Mary’s work again-so many regard her to have started and stopped with ‘Frankenstein’ yet she leaves a body of work which is unrivalled for that time by a woman.

It is incredibly clever to create a gothic story around the woman who wrote the gothic masterpiece whilst acknowledging the time Mary wrote in, her background and her love life and I absolutely loved it.It’s very very clever indeed and absolutely comes across as a work of passion and heart and I am extremely grateful to have read it.

Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in gothic literature, classic horror, feminism and Romanticism.

About the author…

Alex Nye is the award-winning author of four novels. She grew up in Norfolk by the sea, but has lived in Scotland since 1995 where she finds much of her inspiration in Scottish history. At the age of 16 she won the W H Smith Young Writers’ Award out of 33,000 entrants, and has been writing ever since. Her first children’s novel, CHILL, won the Royal Mail Award. Her fourth book is a historical novel for adults about Mary Queen of Scots. Her forthcoming title, ARGUING WITH THE DEAD, is to be released on July 31st 2019. She divides her time between walking the dog, swimming, scribbling in notebooks in strange places, staring at people without meaning to, and tapping away on her laptop. She also teaches and delivers atmospheric candlelit workshops on creative writing/ghost stories/Scottish history. She studied at King’s College, London more years ago than she cares to remember

Links-https://alexnyewriter.wordpress.com/

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Twitter @AlexNyeWriter

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