Requiem For The Author of Frankenstein is an intriguing and ambitious first full-length novel by Molly Dwyer. It delves into the relationship between the present and the past, reality and unreality, living and dead, being both a Gothic ghost story and philosophical treatise on the recovery of feminine genius in our narrative of history to feed the future. Not all parts of the novel are equally successful, but the author succeeds in bringing the Romantic period, with all its colourful characters, to very believable life, and that makes this a very good read.
Dwyer takes her interest in the recovery of feminine creative power and creates a story around two intriguing ideas. One idea is inspired by this quote:
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed,
And what if in your dream you went to heaven
And there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower,
And what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand?
Ah, what then?
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
The other is explained in this excerpt from Dwyer’s essay on "Dreams and Synchronicity," taken from her website:
And thus we find ourselves embedded in a natural world that cooperates with human consciousness. We find evidence that nature is not a separate "Other," not a mechanical backdrop against which we live, but rather an ecological system in which we exist. In fact, to understand what "reality" is, we must recognize ourselves as participants in a multi-faceted relationship with all that is.
Requiem For the Author of Frankenstein (which I’ll now shorten to Requiem) questions our relationship to reality as it follows the story of modern day Anna, who has been invited to give a paper on Mary Shelley in England. Oddly, since deciding to do the paper, Anna has been having strange dreams involving not only Mary Shelley, but all the key players in her story—and the dreams seem so real, Anna has picked up stakes and travelled to England to research and write her paper.
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