10 Questions for Kathleen Ann Goonan on her novel, Queen City Jazz (1994), and its relationship to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

1. The “Frankenstein and You” Question: Can you tell us about your own reading history with Frankenstein? When did you first encounter it?

History:  I don’t recall reading Frankenstein until the early 2000’s, odd as that may sound.  The early vector in which I might have encountered Frankenstein earlier was the library.

It probably was not shelved as children’s literature in Cincinnati, Honolulu, or Fairfax County, Virginia during the 1950’s and 60’s, and it might not even have been in the adult section when I begin to roam there, probably at age twelve or so.  It was probably in the eclectically stocked bookstore I worked in during college, but I didn’t read it then, nor was it on the syllabus of any course I took.  If I did see a copy, I didn’t pick it up.  From a very young age, I moved through stalagmites of books in my room; my father’s efforts to stay ahead of our book madness by building bookshelves was marvelously enabling, and once I left home, my rooms, backpack, car, and tables were always swamped in a sea of books.

Given this, I am surprised that no one had ever told me that Frankenstein was well worth reading. I cannot help but think that this may be because Mary Shelley was a woman, and that her great accomplishment was therefore ignored as her name became synonymous with a lumbering, slapstick, moneymaking monster, when in actuality her monster, and the issues his very existence raised, are so very complex and fascinating.

That would have been because its meme preceded it, like a bow wave that pushed aside any connection between my own interests and the truth of the actual novel.  A lumbering, ravaging monster with a bolt-shot head created by the proverbial mad scientist, which was all I knew about Frankenstein, just didn’t catch my attention.  The powerful philosophical arguments Shelley puts forth in sharp, clean prose and the character development of the yearning, lonely monster would have been the kind of intellectual elixir I actively, constantly sought.

First encounter:  In 2002, Lisa Yaszek of Georgia Tech invited me to give a talk in relation to the NIH Traveling Exhibit “Frankenstein:  Penetrating the Secrets of Nature.” In preparation, I read of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, several biographies of Mary Shelley, and a fair amount of critical discourse in order to write my talk, “Sorting the Sunlight: Frankenstein, Nanotechnology, and Literary Vision in the 21st Century.”

 

2. The “Frankenstein and Your Work” question. For Queen City Jazz, you have stated in an interview for a Georgia Tech event on Frankenstein’s legacy that focused on your novel and its similarities to Shelley’s work, that you didn’t really have Shelley’s story in mind when you wrote. Have you reread her work since the parallels were pointed out? Were you surprised by what you found there? What did you find there that interested you?

The Georgia Tech event really didn’t actually focus on my work, though I did bring it into the talk toward the end, nor was the invitation framed in that way. Instead, I was invited to give a talk about Frankenstein’s continuing relevance to how science is perceived today (see a link to the talk above).  I assumed that I was invited because throughout my Nanotech Quartet (Queen City Jazz, Mississippi Blues, Crescent City Rhapsody, and Light Music) I fictionally examine the uses of science and technology, including who gets to make decisions about how technology is used and how unintended consequences impact individuals and society.

Some surveys show that a significant portion of our fellows disbelieve and mistrust science, despite the fact that most aspects of their daily lives depend upon successful technological use of scientific discoveries.

We float uneasily on a sea of science that has the power to change us and society in deep and powerful ways.  It already has.  The problem is that we lack the power to predict the consequences.   This has not changed since Shelley’s time.  The idea that knowledge will do away with religion still has tremendous influence, and, in this country, has created a culture that therefore denigrates science. In a class I taught at Georgia Tech in which students read biographies of Darwin, Meitner, Loomis, Turing, Feynman, and Kandel, one student made it clear that though he had no real idea about Darwin’s life, thought processes, or theory, he hated Darwin with a religion-based hatred, and had no intention of being swayed.

I shamelessly used this dichotomy in QCJ, setting my no-technology Shakers smack against the inscrutable City in a narrative that raises many of the same question questions as did Shelley in Frankenstein.

Because something is possible, must we do it?  Does commerce or informed discussion determine our available choices?  Must the roads roll no matter what the cost to a particular individual?  Ought those who would be impacted not have the opportunity to use a new technology to, perhaps, save their own life, if they take responsibility for the fact that it might well fail, and perhaps hideously?  Should tools to create potentially massive change, such as gene editing, be in the hands of the individual, governments, or the military, or should they, and perhaps even scientific enquiry, be completely banned, and we left only with canticles?

Frankenstein is a perfect vehicle to spur discussions about such issues.

What surprised me?  See question one:  why had I not read it?

And more to your point, perhaps the biggest surprise is that I had no idea there was a mad scientist in QCJ.   Bereaved, he strove to re-create, and grief, like love, often resembles madness.

3. The “History of Its Reception” question: Shelley’s work has been influential on numerous works, so much so that even retellings, like Whale’s 1931 movie, are themselves hugely influential on storytellers. Are there later works, themselves perhaps influenced by Shelley’s novel, that you did have in mind when you wrote Queen City Jazz? Were you thinking, for example, about other mad scientist and creation stories as you developed your story?

My conscious intent in writing QCJ was to create a high-concept book with a postmodern sensibility that played with meaning, time, consciousness, and identity. If I had models, they were Surrealism, and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch—non-American shredders of narrative, which I used to create what I wanted to be a uniquely American novel, as science fiction and jazz are often thought of as having come to fruition or originated in America. Throw in a little Kafka, Woolf, Borges, Calvino, Twain, and a healthy dose of Bebop.

Writers don’t always know what their writing brain is up to.  Part of my practice as a writer is to trust that the part of me that writes deep narrative will kick in at the right time—not always predictably, but with something that is true.  Some writers know everything that will happen before they begin writing, but if I were to outline on a microlevel, the writer in me would not move forward; the process would seem finished, and the writing would be dead, too much like coloring inside the lines.  The particular satisfaction of writing, for me, is the mysterious melding of inner and outer that is the act of creation.  I like to be surprised.

So the answer is that I didn’t consciously intend to write a “mad scientist” into Queen City Jazz. I wrote the novel in a year’s bright blaze, forging pathways between deep memory and the written word.  Sometimes authors are the last to know what they’ve written, and leave it to critics and academics to sort it out; in this case, they have done an admirable job, because wide-ranging connections to QCJ are referenced in a fair number of academic papers and books.

That is not to say that it all came out of my head on a daily basis.  The prevailing vectors of QCJ, which I deeply researched were, in no particular order, the possibilities of nanotech when crossed with biology, which I called bionan, information theory, the science of honeybees and their societies (beginning with the classic Von Frisch research), Shakerism in America, the history of Cincinnati and the early United States, architecture, and American high and low culture, including folk music, jazz, and jazz musicians.  Jazz’s omnivorous incorporation of musical genres and its improvisational foundations are the overriding metaphors of the novel’s composition.

Throw in a few comic strips (Krazy Kat) and novels (Wise Blood, The Crying of Lot 49).  Hemingway plays a bad-tempered baseball game, and the seminal Six Gallery Beat Poet reading has a moment, but with something new—someone at the reading calls out, “Where are the women? Have you cut out their tongues?”  Each chapter is replete with cultural references, with which I had fun; some chapter titles are as allusive and enigmatic as, I hope, “Blood Count” or “Ornithology.” Many are from the Great American Songbook. Titles are free (not lyrics) but if I could have arranged to invent today’s effortless hyperlinks, and if I could have afforded the rights, Scott Joplin, Philip Glass, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker would play at appropriate moments—perhaps just a whisper in the background—and Billie Holiday would sing.

And there was a short raft trip alluding to Huckleberry Finn, a journey which continues in the second book of the Nanotech Quartet, Mississippi Blues.

I definitely bring out the theme of misuse of power, and of extending one’s own vision in a way that interferes with individual identity by imagining the misuse of imaginary futuristic technologies.  I concretized theoretical possibilities of nanotechnology (the novel was written in 1991/92) within the surrealistically recalled art deco Cincinnati of my childhood. In the wake of a nanotech apocalypse, I invented a new way of transmitting information via giant bees (which are not what they seem) and giant flowers, and “metapheromones,” which provide a new, vast alphabet of meaning—a new literacy–when transmitted, via sensors Cincinnati citizens grow in their hands, with which they touch the membranous vectors of information that flow in veins throughout the buildings.  Hey—it works!

I was not consciously thinking at all about any scientist or engineer in particular, but the Frankensteinian meme of conscious misuse of scientific and technological power by one individual who changes life radically was there, in the form of an American Studies professor and her admittedly mad-architect son, with very strange results.

Had I put all this into a book proposal, it probably would have caused a lot of merriment among editors.  However, I wrote it first and sent it out; the first editor who read it bought it, and it became a NYT Notable Book.  But never was there a mention of Frankenstein.

The “Genre” Question: Frankenstein is a key work in a number of linked genres. It’s a late Gothic production and perhaps the first science fiction story. It’s a crucial “sympathetic monster” tale in horror. And its transformations of humanity marks it as fantasy, too. Do you regard it as the first sf story? Is its place in the history of genre important to you and your writing? Your work is located as science fiction. Do you think about your work in terms of genre?

I disagree that Frankenstein is fantasy, except that all science fiction is sometimes regarded as a subset of fantastic literature—a categorization with which I do agree.

QCJ is a creation story with an imperfect god at its heart and a teenaged girl who must break a spell in order to free those caught in the creation—definitely a fantasy trope, except that the spell is based on hard science, and technologies sufficiently advanced as to seem like magic.  Verity must learn the science in order to change the arc of the spell.

Frankenstein was written as SF, and is solidly SF.  Based on scientific research of the time, it was and remains a potent distillation of hopes and fears regarding science-based cultural changes that continue to rock our world. Victor Frankenstein did not think of himself as a magician, but a scientist.  He did not seek a magician for transfer of power. He did research.  With his careful forethought, and in establishing a theory and experimental framework, gathering equipment, and setting up a laboratory, he acted as a scientist.

Based on years of teaching the history of science fiction, I cast my vote for Mary Shelley as the first author to write science fiction as we know it.  As a woman, this pleases me—perhaps selfishly, but after a lifetime of “girls/women can’t, shouldn’t, or don’t,” I very much like that a young woman wrote the first science fiction novel, and a masterpiece at that, and I hope this knowledge empowers other young women to do the same, or do something just as powerful, and as new.

Do I think of my work in terms of genre?  When I began writing, science fiction, which shares Venn diagrams with all kinds of literature in a process analogous to that of jazz, is what came out, and the science fiction community has generously welcomed my work.  I don’t think that it matters, except for marketing reasons, whether my work is called American fiction, slipstream, speculative, interstitial, or science fiction, but I hope that sometimes, in some places, it strays from implied boundaries, and interests those who do not usually read sf.  That said, was recently deeply pleased to discover that John Clute, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, says “Goonan is one of the central authors of the first or second generation for whom sf is a natural tongue; a tongue capable of playing necessary tunes.”

4. The “Gender of the Writer” question: In Mary Shelley’s own time, that a young woman, a teenager, wrote such a “hideous” book shocked some. Attempts to see Percy Shelley as the “true” author continue. Does Shelley’s gender, especially in relation to her solid place in literary and genre history, matter to you and to your interest in her work? Have you encountered many queries on the impact or influence of your gender in terms of your work, as Shelley most definitely did?

Exploration of gender lies at the heart of much that I have tried to bring to awareness in my writing and in my other professional lives as a Montessori teacher, a Georgia Tech professor, public speaker, and consultant—that girls and women need not only equal education, but equal cultural affirmation regarding their capabilities, their potential, and the realization of their hopes and dreams without any diminishment of their power to give birth and to care for their children if that is what they choose.

Mary was parented literally and intellectually by two brilliant freethinkers—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.  Wollstonecraft died soon after Shelley’s birth, so Shelley could only know her mother through her writing, which she read voraciously.  Her father gave her free rein in his bookstore, and made sure that she was as much as possible the inheritor of his and Wollstonecraft’s intellectual depths and radical points of view, which they lived—up to a point.  Mary Shelley was, by all accounts, very surprised when Godwin cut himself off from her when she made the choice to live with Percy Shelly—a doubly scandalous choice, as he was married and had a child.  She might well have thought he would applaud her choice, hang the embarrassment it caused him.

Gender in my work:  My introduction to sf was in the fifties and sixties, via my father’s paperbacks.  I was free to read them, and could not help but think that sf authorship and interest was an exclusively male province, though Judith Merrill’s anthologies were there in force.  But the house was filled with all kinds of books that had a stronger draw.

I was used to putting myself in the POV of a boy, or a male teen in one of my hands-down favorite books, James Ramsay Ullman’s Rimbaud homage, The Day on Fire, which I read when I was thirteen, and the grown men in popular books of the sixties like Catch-22.  I slept in a nook with bookshelves where mass market paperbacks mingled in genre-free abandon, where Ross Thomas, Kate Wilhelm, Le Guin, Fred Pohl, Dostoyevsky, Ray Bradbury, and John Updike partied together, sometimes uneasily. The title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep always intrigued me, but I could put myself in neither Dick’s complex relationships with women nor those of Updike’s work. Both seemed equally foreign, though Rabbit was flat-out unpleasant.  Pynchon, Thomas Wolfe, and Tom Wolfe were terrific favorites.  Perhaps the difference between these authors and Dick was that their prose was gonzo or stream-of-consciousness, and Dick’s, despite his terrific titles, was not, though the actual content was utterly radical.  Neither was that of most of the sf I encountered, which used mundane language to ground its weird visions.  I was into language; most fantasy, including the Ballantine series, used language as a vehicle of transformation, as does poetry.

And I saw few sf novels written by women.

I inclined toward fantasy, surrealism, and poetry—ancient, contemporary, and everything in between.  I thought I would be a poet, write and illustrate children’s literature, and, indeed, write fantasy with deep roots that tapped the unconscious.  My writing career was somewhat delayed by the need to make money (I found out early what publishing poetry paid), and chose to complete a master’s course in Montessori preschool education because I could have my own business.  That worked as well as Disney’s dancing brooms—I quickly had two locations (preschool and elementary) a hundred students, and many employees.  I also had tremendous fun, and the control that I wanted—along with sixty-hour workweeks.  After six years, when things were humming smoothly, one morning I woke up with a novel in mind, and I began writing it.

Somewhere along the line, completely unbeknownst to my waking mind, my creational aspirations had undergone a sea change.  My novel was fantasy.  It was also science fiction.

One key of this change from romantic to pragmatist was that I was immersed in a scientist’s world for thirteen years, and saw the results on a daily basis.  Maria Montessori was Italy’s first female physician, a powerful, world-famous, speech-giving rabble-rousing feminist, and a scientist who, through experiment, discovered and categorized the growing brain’s neuroplasticity and devised an environment that allowed children to choose their own path of development, with stunning, world-spanning results.

At the time, I subscribed to F&SF, Asimov’s, Omni, and all the usual sf suspects. I had read all of Le Guin from the first printing of A Wizard of Earthsea, but in the seventies, even with her magnificent The Dispossessed, she seemed an anomaly in the sea of male sf writers, despite Vinge’s The Snow Queen and the work of Anne McCaffrey’s, Pamela Sargent, Vonda McIntyre,  and others. In the early eighties, I discovered more women sf writers:  more models.  Lisa Tuttle and Sheila Finch stood out, as their work seemed experimental, both in form and in subject matter, than more quotidian sf, and of course Le Guin remained the prime mover in that regard, giving me proof that the sf marketplace had room for women, even the kind of science fiction that I envisioned writing.  In other words, I might make money writing science fiction, as I had not when placing poetry.

When I look back on my influences—an engineer father who read fiction whenever he was not working, hearing stories from my grandparents, born in the nineteenth century, about how technological change had impacted them, my own birth on the cusp of The Future—I see that my decision to write science fiction was nearly inevitable.

In my conclusion to Lisa Yaszek’s Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, I point out that only about thirty per cent of science fiction readers are women, which meshes with a 30% submission rate by women for Asimov’s SF Magazine.  About 30% of science and engineering students are women, and they report a relatively high rate of sexual harassment.  My early self, who endured two years of high school mechanical and architectural drawing classes in which the teacher frequently proclaimed “Girls don’t belong in mechanical (and then, architectural) drawing,” might be surprised at how many women have made it through the gauntlet of sexism which disbelieves that women “cannot, are not, should not.”  I try in all ways to provide girls and young women with positive models and ways to think about their lives and choices through my teaching, writing, and speaking.

In a writer’s group meeting around 1989, my story was critiqued by a new member who was outraged that there were no men in the story.  I was astounded at his vehemence.  I grew up reading plenty of fiction with no female characters, and I pointed this out to him.  Thankfully, he didn’t last long in the group; if he had, it would have confirmed my apprehensions about the field.

I have been well-accepted as a writer of science fiction by fans and colleagues alike. No one has ever told me “Women can’t write science fiction.”  In fact, as Lisa Yaszek has shown in several important anthologies, including her latest, The Future is Female! from Library of America, shows that women have always been at the forefront of the science fiction field.

5. The “Gender and the Story” Question: Yet Shelley wrote a story all about men: it seems to be a profound critique of gender itself. Because of her remarkable approach, her story has drawn interest from Feminist, Gender, and Queer scholars. Women play key roles in Queen City Jazz, particularly Rose, who is part of the City and its creation, and Verity, the Created. Still, Abe Durancy, a man, is your Victor Frankenstein-like mad scientist. Did you, like Shelley, have a gender commentary to make? What can you tell us about gender in your work?

I tend to foreground women and girls in my work, but don’t shy from using a male POV, as in The Bones of Time and In War Times.  My characters, even when masquerading as giant bees or mad scientists, are sometime based on someone I have known, if only glancingly, transmuted from their real selves by being filtered through the substrate of the writing mind.  If Abe Durancy is one such character, it is somewhat alarming that he turned out as he did.

Mary Shelley was surrounded by Men Acting Badly—Shelley, Byron, and the father who had abandoned her half-sister, Fanny Imlay.  Shelley and Byron, like Victor, fathered and then abandoned their own children, whether physically or by putting the children in unhealthy situations in the process of furthering their own artistic quests.  Mary’s father rejected her when she eloped with Percy.

In addition to this, she had grown up reading her mother’s work, including A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Given all of this, it would be surprising if gender issues had not been embedded in her work.

I realize that in this paragraph I will run into the headwinds of much research and settled opinion that I have not read, but consider Shelley’s choice to make her character of power and his offspring male also in light of the fact that she wanted her book to be commercially viable, as well as ground it in the real world as much as possible.  Most of the movers and shakers of the time—except for her own very unusual mother—were men.

For Victor to be Victoria, Shelley would have had to make it seem realistic that Victoria had been sent to the same kind of school as Victor attended, and have her be mentored as Victor was.  It might then have been viewed as being a novel about an extraordinary woman who gains power through education and misuses it—a cautionary tale about educating women, which would hardly have raised a ripple:  of course educated women caused trouble.  Instead, Shelley chose to write about a man gaining knowledge, as was less remarkable.  Thus, she could focus on the story she wanted to tell.

I faced this problem when writing In War Times, my sixth novel, which was the ALA’s best sf novel of the year and won the John W. Campbell Award.  Establishing verisimilitude was a crucial part of that novel because during the 1930’s my female “mad scientist,” Eliani Hadnzt, invents a device that she believes will end war; moreover, her mother had become a medical doctor during a time when few medical schools accepted women.  I modeled Hadnzt after a real scientist, Lise Meitner, who discovered that nuclear fission was possible (the Nobel Prize for her work went to Otto Hahn), and thereby had a template for a woman who was barred from attending school after 8^th grade surmounting the sexism of the time to become a world-renowned physicist.  I also found discovered where Elaini’s mother could have gotten her MD in 1880’s Europe.

When QCJ came out, it attracted attention from feminists, and from academics interested in gender, including N. Kathryn Hales.

6. The “Reception of Your Story” Question: Can you tell us about the reception of your story? Did reviewers or others remark on your story’s use of Shelley in any ways you find interesting?

QCJ came out in November 1994, and within a month it was a NYT Notable Book.  This was back in the days when newspapers regularly published independent reviews of science fiction, and QCJ was widely reviewed.  I was featured in Scientific American’s special nanotech issue, where I was described as a “Shaman of the Small” along with Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson; I was also interviewed by newspaper journalists and on radio and television.  The main questions were always about the possibilities of nanotechnology; never did anyone mention Shelley or Frankenstein.  QCJ has had a second and much more enduring critical life in academia, but mostly in the contexts of gender, feminism, and cyborgs until Dr. Yaszek saw the parallels to Frankenstein in the creation of a fatally flawed life and city.  Two of her students, Kate Sisson (“Updating Mary Shelley”) and Jason Ellis (“Recovered Writing: Undergraduate Gender Studies Final Paper on Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, April 26, 2004”) did a marvelous job of defending this thesis, to which I give a wholehearted “Hurrah!”

7. The “Connecting Ideas” Question: Frankenstein and Queen City Jazz both deal with the ethics of creation. The human desire for control and possession is also critiqued in both works. Both, however, celebrate science’s possibilities and achievements (though this is little noted in relation to Shelley’s novel). Nanotechnology offers amazing possibilities, but real dangers. Have your ideas about the promise and dangers of nanotech changed as that field itself has continued to evolve since the first publication of your book?

As envisioned by Drexler in The Engines of Creation, “nanotechnology” at the time I wrote QCJ (1991-92) was a radical, paradigm-changing concept; as the decade progressed, perceived public unease about the possibilities increased to the extent that the National Science Foundation began a campaign to cast nanotechnology in the light of a technology that would transform all aspects of society in tremendously positive ways.

Drexler’s vision of the possibilities of nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, as outlined in The Engines of Creation—in particular, the self-assembler which might change the world to “gray goo,” or lead to the intermediately dangerous world of Crichton’s Prey—have thus been tempered in the thirty years since its publication.  One of the sticking points turned out to be that nanoscale physics are not those of the “larger” world, so to speak.

In QCJ, there is definitely technology run wildly amuck because of the hubristic actions of a troubled man, who could be called a “mad scientist” or, perhaps a “mad architect.”

After 2000, when Crescent City Rhapsody, the prequel to Queen City Jazz, was published, I was invited to speak at many universities and at international literary festivals about the nanotech-related issues raised therein, many of which were the same as those raised by QCJ.  In 2010, when I began teaching at Georgia Tech, I gave a talk in the gorgeous, just-completed Marcus Nanotech building, which now houses the Institute of Electronics and Nanotechnology.  There, biomedical and semiconductor assembly takes place.  I recently gave another talk in that building, not to budding nanotechnologists, but to budding materials engineers, which gives you an idea of the more practical directions the field of nanotechnology has taken in just eight years. Drexler’s vision of fairly rapid molecular assembly of a final product from a vat of liquid containing the necessary molecules has occurred; it is one version of 3-D printing.

The possibilities of genetic engineering, including the use of CRISPR, are now coming to the forefront of possibilities we need to be thinking about.  Taken to their logical extremes, these technologies and their offspring could also bring about the world of Queen City Jazz, or something like it.

Just not very easily.

8. The “Byronic Hero” question: The “Byronic Hero” appears on our Frankenstein Meme website as a keyword, a crucial theme with many iterations in literature and sf. Victor is a famous embodiment of the dark, brooding, superior, charismatic Byronic Hero; so is, say, Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights from the same time period. Abe Durancy has more than a dash of the Byronic Hero’s maddening brilliance. Were you thinking about developing, if not a Byronic Hero, an antihero or a type of mad scientist? And what “take” did you want to make on this enduring icon?

Abe Durancy fits all the parameters of a Byronic Hero to a tee, and carries more than his fair share of grandiose self-pity.  He follows the crazed crew of Cincinnatians, including Verity and Blaze, down the Ohio River in Mississippi Blues, revealing more of his character in the process.  At the beginning of his journey, he is more quotidian, but the results of his actions have, indeed, driven him mad.

If anything, I wanted to show how a somewhat weak and troubled individual might decide to take actions that impact not only him, but countless others.

I’m afraid I did not treat Durancy with largesse.

10. The “Anniversary” question: The 200-year Anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is upon us. (Cue lightening!) Is there anything more you can tell us about what it means to you that she and her work have become so crucial to modern culture? Is there something about Shelley and her work you wished we had asked, or that we should note, now that we are celebrating her work?

I recently finished Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon, which I strongly recommend.  It clearly shows their powerful feminist stance, which was the intellectual and emotional North Star to which both of them hewed during their turbulent lives.

Mary Shelley, surrounded by utterly hubristic men who tossed women and children to the wind to as they pursued their artistic goals, saw all of that and much more, with clear, strong vision.  Because of her education, her identity of self-worth as the child of two blazing freethinkers, and her ability to unite emotional depths with the science of the day, she had the intellectual and writerly tools to create a story so universal that it remains utterly relevant two hundred years later.  It’s an absolute triumph, and a powerful “vindication of the rights of women.”