Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley is about three days in the life of Mary Shelley. I have a burning interest in the life of Mary Shelley, so I was both excited and poised to nitpick. I also should confess having a bias in favor of the author, Sarah Stegall, because we like to sit on panels together and scream about how much we hate Byron.

As it turns out, I couldn’t find a damn thing to nitpick in this book. The book describes the characters exactly as I always pictured them. Mary is the designated grown-up, with abandonment issues. Claire, Mary’s stepsister, is a spoiled idiot. Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, is the “nice guy,” in the ironic sense – he thinks of himself as a nice guy who will finally make Mary respectable, but he doesn’t understand her at all. Byron is an asshole, and Percy Shelley wafts about in a cloud of sparkly butterflies (not literally). But they also have some depth to their characters, which gives the book intricacy and poignancy. It’s not a romance novel and it will probably appeal most to people who already know something about Mary Shelley’s life. Incidentally, even though Mary and Percy weren’t married during this point in the book, I’ll occasionally refer to them as “The Shelleys” just for clarity and succinctness.

The book covers June 14, 1816, to June 16, 1816. During this time, both in the story and in real life, Mary, Percy, Claire, Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician John Polidori stayed at Lake Geneva. Mary and Percy believed in free love, and lived together as a couple even though Percy was, at this time, still married to another woman. The group spent a lot of time indoors because it was “The Year Without a Summer,” an unusually cold and stormy year. It was during this summer that the group decided to compete with each other to see who could write the scariest story. Mary Shelley wrote a story that she expanded and turned into the novel Frankenstein.

In the book, the families engage in pursuits both dramatic and routine. Mary’s cook quits, leading to a domestic crisis. Her infant son needs to be nursed, often at inconvenient times. Lord Byron is an aristocrat but Mary Shelley and her sister are not, and Percy has been cut off by his father, so issues like how to pay for candles are big problems for the Shelleys. Meanwhile Polidori has to work for Byron because he needs the money and the sponsorship, and he and Byron have serious clashes regarding class.

The group also has problems of a more dramatic nature. Claire is sure that Byron loves her, while Byron dislikes her but still has sex with her. At least Byron is honest about the situation, one that Claire refuses to accept. Meanwhile, everyone but Mary believes that Percy and Claire are sleeping together or have in the past, and Mary and Claire alternate between being kind to each other and being at one another’s throats. Polidori has a crush on Mary and Mary just wants some fucking peace and quiet. Since the unwed Claire is pregnant with Byron’s baby, Mary’s chances of getting some peace and quiet are not good.

It’s interesting that so much of this book involves people’s failure to see one another clearly. Instead, they create versions of people and they act as though these constructs are true. Claire sees Byron as a wounded soul who loves her and will be healed by her love. (It’s a painful and ugly deconstruction of the “rogue healed by a good woman” trope). Percy Shelley sees Byron as a rebel who lives according to his principles. Polidori sees Mary as a victim of an unfaithful lover (who, at the time, was married to another woman). Mary Shelley sees Byron initially as a heartless man who has no principles at all – later she comes to believe that he has a heart but that this heart has not led him to compassionate or responsible behavior.

As the story progresses, some characters see each other more clearly. This is, in fact, most of the plot. In particular, Mary struggles to get Percy to understand that even though they share the same principles in some ways (such as, among other things, the concept of free love), she believes he and the other men in his life are not matching those principles of free love with principles of responsibility:

You, perhaps are free, as all men are freer than women. Albé [Byron] is free. Polidori, even is free. Claire and Mary, however, cannot have the freedom in this world that we were promised.

It’s especially interesting to contemplate this concept in parallel with Frankenstein’s Monster. The monster is literally an artificial construct, made from pieces of people and animals in an attempt to match the image in his creator’s mind. When the monster doesn’t match that image, the creator, Frankenstein, rejects the monster. The monster goes through the book allowing himself to be whatever others define him as. If given space, dignity, and kindness, he is intelligent, contemplative, and peaceful. If people see him as a monster, he resolves to be the scariest monster ever.

The book uses the writing of Frankenstein as Mary’s moment of finding her own voice and her own emotional center. It’s a satisfying narrative arc, although in real life her confidence went up and down as she experienced periods of grief and depression long after writing the first version of Frankenstein. In this book, Mary sees herself as an outcast who has to find a sense of security in herself instead of the opinion of others, and she also has to find a sense of emotional security within herself because she can’t find a sense of permanence or stability in either her father, who is not speaking to her, or in Percy. Writing Frankenstein shows that she has the capacity to be as intelligent and creative as the men around her. In practical terms, it means she can make money.

I’m not sure how much this book would appeal to the general reader, but it is very well written. As someone with a specific interest in and some knowledge about the topic, I loved the book. It was a tiny but important window into the lives of people I could only approach in an abstract way through other research. It was thoughtful and interesting and frankly pretty juicy, too. The only reason I gave it a B instead of an A is that I think people who are new to Mary’s story will feel that the jump into the plot is too abrupt. For people who are already Mary Shelley fans, this book is perfect reading for a “dreary night in November.”