She was born Jane Webb her father, Thomas Webb, was initially wealthy, but fell on hard times, which appears to have provided the initial stimulus for his daughter to write. Like Mary Shelley, Jane Loudon did not, at the time when she produced her most famous work, bear the name by which she would later become better known. Loudon found in Frankenstein, and she did not like what she read.

This certainly seems to have been the message which Jane C.

The anonymous reviewer in La Belle Assemblée was unusually kind in declaring that, ‘did not the author, in a short Preface, make a kind of apology, we should almost pronounce it to be impious’ the reviewer of the Edinburgh Magazine simply declared that it was a novel ‘bordering too closely on impiety’. Given that Percy Shelley was already notorious as an atheist, it was not hard to see that this was also the implication of Frankenstein, a book in which a man arrogates to himself, with at least partial success, the bestowing of life, always before seen as the privilege of God alone.

As the second sentence of the review in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany confidently declared, Frankenstein ‘is formed on the Godwinian manner’, while Sir Walter Scott delicately circumvented the difficulties of the situation by writing in his review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that ‘it is said to be written by Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-in-law to Mr Godwin’. It immediately caused a stir, not least because, although it was published anonymously, the dedication to William Godwin (Mary’s father) meant that a number of reviewers successfully identified its author as sharing the philosophical and political predilections of both Godwin and Percy Shelley (with whom Mary was cohabiting). Mary Shelley’s first novel Frankenstein, as is well known, was first published in 1818, when its author, then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was only nineteen.

This essay is about two authors, Jane Loudon and Mary Shelley, and the ways in which the one reflects upon the other.

The Mummy! by Jane C. Webb Loudon