Excerpt from Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And make his eye-balls roll with wonted sight.


Then I see it. I think I see it. What do I seem to see? A figure, gigantic, ragged, moving swiftly on the rocks above me, climbing away from me, his back turned to me, his movements sure, and at the same time hesitant, like a young dog whose paws are too big for him. I

thought to call out but I confess I was afraid.

And then the vision was gone.

Surely, I thought, if it is some traveller who has lost his way he will find our villa. But he was climbing away, as though he had found the villa already and passed on.

Troubled that I had indeed seen a figure, equally troubled that I had imagined him, I made my return to the house. I crept in softly, this time through a side door, and, shivering with cold, I made my way up the curve of the staircase.

My husband stood on the landing. I approached him, naked as Eve, and I saw the man of him stir beneath the apron of his shirt.

I was out walking, I said. Naked? he said.

Yes, I said.

He put out his hand and touched my face.

What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?


We were all around the fire that night, the room more shadows than light, for we had few candles, and none could be fetched until the weather bettered.

Is this life a disordered dream? Is the external world the shadow, while the substance is what we cannot see, or touch, or hear, yet apprehend?

Why, then, is this dream of life so nightmarish?

Feverish? Sweatish?

Or is it that we are neither dead nor alive? A being neither dead nor alive.

All my life I have feared such a state, and so it has seemed better to me to live how I can live, and not fear death.

So I left with him at seventeen and these two years have been life to me.


In the summer of 1816 the poets Shelley and Byron, Byron's physician, Polidori, Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, by then Byron's mistress, rented two properties on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Byron enjoyed the grand Villa Diodati, while the Shelleys took a smaller, more charming house, a little lower down the slope.

Such was the notoriety of the households that an hotel on the farther shore of the lake set up a telescope for their guests to watch the antics of the supposed Satanists and Sexualists who held their women in common.

It is true that Polidori was in love with Mary Shelley but she refused to sleep with him. Byron might have slept with Percy Shelley, if Shelley had been so inclined, but there is no evidence of that. Claire Clairmont would have slept with anyone – on this occasion she slept only with Byron. The households spent all their time together – and then it started to rain.


My husband adores Byron. Each day they take a boat out on the lake, to talk about poetry and liberty, whilst I avoid Claire, who can talk about nothing. I must avoid Polidori, who is a lovesick dog.

But then the rain came, and these downpouring days allow for no lake-work.

At least the weather allows no staring at us from the farther shore either. In town I heard the rumour that a guest had spied half a dozen petticoats spread out to dry on Byron's terrace. In truth, what they saw was bed linen. Byron is a poet but he likes to be clean.


And now we are confined by innumerable gaolers, each formed out of a drop of water. Polidori has brought a girl up from the village to entertain him, and we do what we can on our damp beds, but the mind must be exercised as well as the body.


That night we sat around the steaming fire talking of the supernatural.

Shelley is fascinated by moonlit nights and the sudden sight of ruins. He believes that every building carries an imprint of the past, like a memory, or memories, and that these can be released if the time is right. But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past – yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.

Excerpted from Frankissstein: A Love Story copyright © 2019 by Jeanette Winterson. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.