J t edson, p.1
Love, Sex and Frankenstein, page 1
About the Author
Caroline Lea grew up on the island of Jersey. The Glass Woman, her debut, is a gothic thriller set during the Icelandic witch trials. The Metal Heart, a Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month, is an epic Second World War love story; Prize Women reveals a feminist scandal at the heart of the Roaring Twenties. Her latest novel reimagines Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein.
Love, Sex & Frankenstein
‘An enthralling read. Beautifully written, this story of a woman’s rage and her discovery of writing as an outlet is gripping’
Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things
‘Utterly compelling and immersive. I was hooked from the first page and looked forward to every moment I could spend with this stunning novel. Hauntingly beautiful, dangerous and magnificent, the isolated villa on Lake Geneva and the wild storms which battered it held me captive, as I witnessed Mary Shelley’s transformation from lovesick teenager to a fiercely feminist young. In short: I have been altered by this novel’
Anya Bergman, author of The Witches of Vardo
‘Richly woven, gorgeously addictive, this is a true Gothic novel about life, death, desire, fury and passion. Conjuring the transformation that comes when we look into the dark shadows of the soul and acknowledge the longing that resides there, I absolutely loved this novel’
Joanne Burn, author of The Bone Hunters
‘Beautifully written and wonderfully intense, this is no glamorous story of the rock star poets and their female muses but a rendition of absolute powerlessness turned around through sheer force of will. Lea throws light onto the true brilliance of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a girl raised to believe in freedom who would live out her beliefs against all the odds. A thrilling read’
Elizabeth Fremantle, author of Disobedient
‘An astonishing, spectacular masterpiece. Mary Shelley’s battle to find her own voice becomes, in Caroline’s hands, about loving the monster inside us all and the freedom that can bring’
Julie Owen-Moylan, author of 73 Dove Street
‘An exquisitely written Gothic thriller that captures the horror and romance of the life of Mary Shelley and the circumstances that gave birth to Frankenstein. Lea shows how Mary Shelley finds her strength and anger to create new life, bringing the past alive with sensitive insight. Wonderful’
Laura Shepperson, author of The Heroines
‘An intoxicating tale about the monsters suppressed inside us. Fury and passion, obsession and revenge sizzle beneath the surface – what a firecracker of a story’
Fiza Saeed McLynn, author of The Midnight Carousel
‘The best rendition of Mary Shelley to be found in a novel. Here is a glorious story of female awakening and rage. Brava’
Essie Fox, author of The Fascination
‘A deliciously dark reimagining of the birth of literature’s greatest monster, Love, Sex & Frankenstein is at once a heartbreaking Gothic love story and a chilling study of rage, betrayal and the mysterious origins of the creative impulse. A triumph’
Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters
‘Lea creates a world that is so vividly realised, it is astonishing to read. All her characters are wonderfully nuanced, and you cannot help but fall in love with Mary, whose journey as an artist and as a woman is both absolutely heartbreaking and truly inspiring. This is a deeply moving, magical book from a consummate storyteller’
Elodie Harper, author of The Wolf Den
Caroline Lea
* * *
LOVE, SEX & FRANKENSTEIN
As always, for Arthur and Rupert and Roger, with all of my love and a little of my rage.
letter 1
Dear Reader,
You are eighteen years old. Cast out by your father, shunned by society, you have fled to Geneva with your lover and your sister. The closeness of their relationship makes you furious, but if you protest, your lover will abandon you. Confined by terrible storms, you find yourself in a house with your lover, your sister and Lord Byron, an infamous and magnetically attractive poet. You know he is dangerous, but you find yourself drawn to him. When he sets a challenge to write a ghost story, all the turmoil that has boiled within you finds a voice.
The anger pours from your pen in a roar of rage. Even as the monster that emerges terrifies you, you understand that it belongs to you. This creature that crawls across the page is the woman you were always meant to be. And in Byron, this furious beast that you have kept hidden for so long may have found a mate. You are eighteen years old. The creature you have created will howl its way onto page and stage and screen, burning its path across history in its desire to be seen, to be known, to be loved. The monster will never be silenced. Neither will you.
This story of Mary, her fury and her monster emerged from me in my own roar of rage. Who hasn’t felt the pressure to be good and agreeable? Haven’t you, too, been confined by the thought that only a certain part of you is lovable? The rest – the darkest, most monstrous part – must be hidden. Mary Shelley’s rejected creature lives within all of us. This book unleashes it. Mary’s story poured from me with a raw and urgent anger. Love, Sex & Frankenstein is about love, longing, and the desperate desire to speak up, to speak out, and to have your heart heard.
I hope your heart is heard.
Thank you for reading,
Caroline Lea
March 2025
Prologue
Geneva, 1816
At dusk, the sky over Lake Geneva is the colour of blood in a glass of water. The ash fragments falling over the city form a strange fog – a thickening of the air, which swirls through the deserted streets, past the spire of the old cathedral and over the walls of the new Protestant church. Inside, people are on their knees, praying for the uncanny cloud to lift. It is a judgement, they fear, a punishment from God, or else a curse.
This night, like so many before it, the choking dust has driven the residents of the city into the shelter of shuttered houses and places of prayer. Outside, there is no one to witness the way the ash gleams as it settles on the lake. The water flickers and shimmers, each tiny filament glowing like a candle, sinking into the silence, quickly snuffed out.
The lake is chill and dark and deep – not even the fishermen have fathomed its depths, or the small children who, on any other evening, would be taking turns to dive beneath the surface, competing to see who could swim down the furthest, stay under the longest.
No one is standing on the lake’s stony shores to watch the water’s surface glow, red as the strange sky above. No one is there to see the darkness beneath the water shift and stir and coalesce, parting for a breath, like two slick thighs, which fall back into the darkness with a gasp that is almost human.
Above, half masked by cloud, a thin slash of moon hangs hazy and indifferent. A lone figure stumbles down to the lake and scrambles into a small rowboat that one of the fishermen has left bobbing at the end of a long line. Looking right, then left, the man leans forward over the rope. Flash of steel from the blade in his hand. A quick tug and the boat is free. The man settles himself on the rocking boards, tugging the oars. No one will see him on this cloud-deadened, mist-muffled night. No one will stop him. Still, his breath stutters and stumbles. He must be quick. His hands ache, his chest burns. His eyes feel gritty as the mist parts before him, then closes around him, giving him the strange sensation of being swallowed.
He is a poor rower, the boat’s progress weaving and uneven until, gasping, the man drops the oars and lies back, gazing up at the darkening sky, at the hazed half-smile of the moon. And beyond, the smothered light of the stars, like muted bells, calling to no one.
Later, they will say that Karl Vogel – who was young and handsome and had been popular once – was drunk and that was why he’d taken Matthieu Favre’s boat, or that he’d intended to play a prank, then fallen asleep. They will say that he jumped into the water, that he tried to swim to shore and grew tired. They will whisper that perhaps he’d gone mad, at last, this lonely man who was only twenty-five but had borne enough grief for double that number of years. He’d lost his wife and two children to cholera the previous spring; perhaps he’d decided he couldn’t go on. Grief takes some people that way.
All the same, they will say how strange it is, early the next morning, when his clothes are found in the beached boat, laid out exactly as he would have worn them – tattered shirt inside dirty sweater; the sweater inside the regimental red coat with the ragged yellow trim that he had worn proudly every day, though Napoleon’s war has been over for more than a year. Karl Vogel’s clothes are dry and unmarked – unremarkable, except that Karl Vogel is nowhere to be found.
Listen to the beat, the drumming of feet down the cobbled streets, through the forest paths, past the rust of last year’s bracken, over the stones to the shore of the lake.
The body barely shifts in the shallows; no one moves to pull it from the water. The once-handsome face is pale-skinned and blue-lipped, as though carved from a rare and expensive marble, but this is not why the people have stopped, why they put their hands to their mouths, then turn away in confusion.
Certainly it is Karl Vogel – it must be him, for there are his muscular calves, see his narrow shoulders, note the shape of his hands, his fingers smooth from the past year spent indoors drowning his grief in bad wine – and, besides, who else could it be? And yet, where Karl Voge
It is late May, the tail-end of spring. In any other year, warm wet days would give way to a stretch of sun-soaked evenings, but this year, the air is bitter, the sky shrouded in the strange mist no one can explain.
Beneath the funeral lace of leafless trees, three travellers wend their way across the hills overlooking the lake, cloaked and hooded against the griping cold and biting breeze. Skeins of smoke – or what looks like smoke – spiral through the air. Instead of the gleaming lake the travellers had expected, the water is almost obscured. They cannot yet see the group of people crowding around the body on the lakeshore. They can’t hear the cries of shock and confusion.
Instead, the city seems entirely grey and silent, as though torn from an artist’s sketchbook. Instead, as eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley squints through the stinging, gritty fog – at the beginning of summer – it starts to snow.
PART ONE
* * *
London
1
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
Three weeks earlier
Dawn in London. Low-hanging clouds, stained a strange pink. In this gauzy light, the streets are quiet as a held breath. Beggars doze in doorways or shelter under archways. Women wearing low-cut dresses and carefully assembled smiles retire to their rooms for a few hours of blissful solitude. The gentry and nobility are tucked into their beds in the new townhouses, which overlook the green squares of Mayfair. Dukes and duchesses snore while their scullery-maids light fires and their cooks load the oven with sweetened dough and dishes of lamb and capon for dinner.
Two bailiffs stride along Old Bethlem Street without turning their eyes to the oyster shops and butchers’. They step around beggars and over mounds of horse and pig muck, without once breaking their stride. The older man has spent the night at a tavern, drowning any doubts about what they are about to do; occasionally he staggers sideways. Once, he slips on a smear of manure and curses. The younger man is jumpy and red-eyed from lack of sleep. They carry wooden batons, the ends stained a dark ochre. The drunken man wears a belt; in it is a blade. He has told himself he will not touch it, that it’s just for show.
The two men are accustomed to uncomfortable work: bashing skulls and smashing kneecaps at home is preferable to marching for days and risking death in a foreign field. They’ve been collecting debts since they were sent home injured from Waterloo last summer – it had been the younger man’s first and last battle.
War-hardened though they might be, this particular task on this particular day is something both men tried to refuse. Harming women and children is a job for cowards and scoundrels.
But everything is more expensive in this dark year, when the ice of winter just will not pass – harvests have failed, meat is scarcer, and the price of bread has doubled. The men have families of their own to feed. So as first sunlight blushes above the sooty spires of the old city, they move with purpose, as if a thin thread is pulling them on towards the grubby rooms in Bishopsgate.
The knocking and hammering on the door jolts Mary upright in bed. Her eyes sting and her head is fuzzy, as if with too much wine. She tries to blink away the vestiges of another nightmare – this time, she had been lost on a wind-blasted hill, searching for her baby, who was somewhere nearby, screaming.
Her stepsister Claire is still asleep, curled into the grubby sofa, her dark curls fanned across the stained cushions.
‘Open up!’ the man growls, from behind the door.
Mary pulls her baby, William, close to her chest and huddles under the damp sheets – perhaps the covering of thin material might keep him asleep and quiet a little longer.
Claire wakes, sits up and tiptoes over to the broken rocking chair, picks up a water-warped copy of Macbeth and pretends to read, as though she can’t hear the scuffing of boots and muttering from outside. Yesterday morning, when she did this, Mary had tried to laugh, but the men sound angrier today, their voices harsher.
‘Just kick the fucking door in. It’s half-rotten anyway.’
Mary clenches her jaw. She is not afraid. These men won’t hurt her. She doesn’t think they will hurt her. Her mouth is dry.
In the rocking chair, Claire makes a great performance of trying to focus, deliberately setting her face in a severe scowl, squinting at the pages and shaking her head, like an elderly accountant at his books. She’s always been a great actress. Even on the coldest mornings, when their stomachs pinch with hunger and they shiver, staring longingly at the dead ash in the grate, waiting for the bailiffs to leave so they can light a meagre fire, Claire tries to make Mary smile. Sometimes, she feigns being hard of hearing, cupping her ear towards the cacophony outside the door. Or she pretends that her slice of dry bread is a feast – she blows out her cheeks and clutches her stomach, as though she couldn’t manage another bite. Usually, the bailiffs give up after a quarter of an hour of hammering.
But this morning they start kicking the door almost at once. They’ve never done this before. When the first boot hits the wood and the door judders in its frame, Mary’s heart jolts. Claire looks up in alarm, before returning to feigning deafness in the rocking chair.
‘Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub?’ she whispers to Mary.
Mary attempts a smile but her mouth trembles. She is so tired of being frightened all the time. She feels as if she has swigged from Shelley’s opium flask – everything is slightly distant and unreal, as if it is happening to someone else.
‘No use pretending,’ a man shouts, his mouth pressed against the door, so the bass notes of his anger reverberate through the wood. ‘We’ve been told you’re in there.’
Mary glances towards the cracked wall. The family who live in the rooms next door won’t be any help – they never come to see if the sisters are well, never respond to the baby’s screams or the bickering, or the occasional howls of anguish and rage that they must be able to hear through the thin walls.
More hammering.
If only Shelley were here – but, no, that is a selfish thought. The bailiffs would drag him off to debtors’ prison before breakfast. Then she would be truly alone. He is hiding somewhere in London. She can see him on Sundays, when the bailiffs aren’t working. She must be happy with that.
Baby Willmouse grumbles and shifts in Mary’s arms. She loosens her tight grip a little, then jiggles and hushes him, but it is too late: his eyelids flutter and he gives a wail.
The men boot the door harder and faster, slapping their palms against the wood.
‘Come out, Shelley! No use hiding like a maid.’
Mary hasn’t seen Shelley for five days. She has no idea where he goes between their weekly meetings, which he insists must be in a tree-shrouded corner of St Pancras Gardens or in the dark recesses of a busy coffee house. She longs to hear his voice, to hear him tell her where he has been or whom he has seen, while he holds their child or puts his arm around her waist. She would be content simply to lay her head upon his shoulder while he describes the books he has been reading, his warm hand resting on her thigh. But he insists it is safer if he stays away from her, if he keeps his distance while he is resolving his debts. The pain of his absence is an ache in her bones – like cold and hunger, those constant companions.
