Happy Halloween!

Of the three iconic literary monsters of the nineteenth century, two of them were created by women writers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so well known that she is often (rightly) credited with being the mother of science fiction. Jane Webb’s The Mummy is treated more as a curiosity; indeed she is better known as a garden writer under her married name, Jane C. Loudon. But both women shared a conviction about a women’s place in the scientific world that was completely at odds with the nineteenth-century stereotype of a “lady scribbler.”

The story of Frankenstein’s genesis is well-known. During the “wet uncongenial summer” of 1816, the bored guests at the Villa Diodati spent an evening responding to Byron’s challenge, “We will each write a ghost story.” As Shelley describes in her preface to the 1831 version of her novel, “Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”

In contrast, the story of The Mummy’s genesis could not be more prosaic. Orphaned and penniless at 17, Jane Webb turned to writing as one of the few ways available to women to earn a living. However, the story does have a romantic ending — at least for the scientifically minded. Among the favorable review of The Mummy was one by John C. Loudon in The Gardener’s Magazine. An authority on horticulture, Loudon was impressed by Webb’s futuristic imagining of a steam-driven plow, and with in a year, the two were married. After her marriage, Jane turned her scientific talents to her husband’s field, and created the first popular gardening manuals, which were the first to advocate gardening and botanizing as suitable activities for young women.

Frankenstein is by far the better structured novel, using the customary Gothic trope of a novel in manuscripts to create the claustrophobic suspense of a man on the verge of madness. (Indeed, at least one critic has argued, unsuccessfully, IMHO, that in fact Frankenstein failed to animate the monster, and the rest of the story is a guilt-fueled dream.) The Mummy is a gleeful antitdote to Frankenstein’s fraught romanticism. Subtitled “A Tale of the 22nd Century,” The Mummy is a freewheeling canvas that provides ample room for Webb’s imagination, from mid-air balloon traffic jams and electrically-enhanced ball gowns to Cheops, who is the canny, articulate opposite of Shelley’s shuffling, inarticulate monster.