Mary: or, the Birth of Frankenstein

At fourteen, Mary Shelley stays with a family in Scotland, where a close friendship develops with Isabella Baxter. Together they wander through the area, which for centuries has held tales of monsters and ghosts, and one day, deep in the forest, they encounter a man who is not a man. His limbs are clumsy and ugly, his head neither human nor animal.

Four years later, Mary and her lover Percy Shelley visit her friends John Polidori and Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. In the evenings, by the fireside, they tell each other stories. A flicker of memory takes her back to her time with Isabella in Scotland, and also to David Booth, a highly intelligent, charismatic, yet also creepy man, who developed a great interest in Mary and Isabella.

Then the monster from the forest reappears, and from that thought, her story about Frankenstein's monster arises. Mary is an ode to the imagination, a story about creation, about the inseparable bond between fantasy and reality. And like Mary Shelley, Anne Eekhout shows the power of a woman when she brings something into the world that no one thought possible.