The multilayered narrative of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has fascinated both critics and general readers ever since the novel’s first publication in 1818. Their main interests, however, have tended to lie in the narratives of its protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and his hideous creature, thus overlooking the significance of the outermost layer in the novel: the letters from Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. According to the British Critic’s 1818 review of Frankenstein, this “sort of introduction, which precedes the main story of the novel” has “nothing else to do with it.” In the present age, Frankenstein is often regarded as the prime example of a fictional work which “shifts from epistolary immediacy to monologic narrative, from eighteenth-century novels of letters to nineteenth-century first person narratives” (Britton 2009). These remarks seem to suggest that the epistolary form was no longer valued in the early nineteenth century. It should be pointed out, however, that Mary Shelley was deeply read in epistolary novels, especially the ones written by her own parents. This essay maintains that Shelley was keenly aware of the fact that she was born into a family of literary geniuses, and that her choice of an epistolary format for her very first work shows her desire to invigorate this slightly outdated mode. It attempts to shed light on her masterly performance of epistolarity, first by closely examining the way in which she created “Letters from the Arctic” à la Letters from Sweden (1796) by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I then try to give a possible answer to the question of why these fictional letters are addressed to “a dear sister in England,” whose own voice is totally silenced. By considering the creation of Margaret Saville, I hope to shed light on the imaginative dialogue between Shelley and her own half-sister, Fanny Wollstonecraft. Lastly, I analyse the “mock epistolarity” (O’Dea 2004) in Frankenstein, hoping to clarify the innovativeness of Shelley’s narrative. I conclude with a brief examination of the voices of women skillfully embedded in this seemingly “unfeminine” epistolary novel.
