Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein

Anna Trevor, a young American scholar, has the kind of mind Mary Shelley must have foreseen. During waking hours Anna is preparing a controversial paper on Frankenstein. When asleep, she falls into alarmingly realistic dreams, meeting Mary and learning the truths that only the author herself could know.In England, where Anna has come to present her paper, synchronicity and seeming coincidence abound. While staying with her cousin, Rose, Anna learns of a fragile ancestral tie to the Shelleys. She travels to Manesbrook Manor with Rose's son, Taylor, to meet ninety-four-year-old Auntie Francis, who claims to have been intimate with remnants of the Shelley family and speaks of writings never made available to scholars—hidden, perhaps, in the manor's cellar, which has been sealed for seventy-five years. When Taylor's brother-in-law, Peter, arrives, Anna's dreams spill over into her waking state, suggesting that they're more than archeological expeditions into a distant past. Anna begins to believe that Mary and her legendary lovers, the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, actually exist as conscious beings sharing time and space—and mind—with her.Are Anna's dreams “real” experiences capable of influencing both the present and the past and of healing the wounded imaginations of all concerned? Is this a ghost story? A tale of mystical encounters in a state of consciousness where all time is present time? Requiem is an impeccably researched portrait of the brilliance and daring of the author of Frankenstein. It is a tribute, a philosophical novel that embraces the Romanticism of Mary Shelley's day. It is a symbolic unfolding of the recovery of the creative genius of the feminine, and a literary fiction that, like its namesake, rides the thin edge between the rational and the irrational.