y resting her terrors on a
pseudo-scientific basis and by placing her story in a definite
locality, Mrs. Shelley waives her right to an entire suspension
of disbelief. If it be reduced to its lowest terms, the plot of
Frankenstein, with its bewildering confusion of the prosaic and
the fantastic, sounds as crude, disjointed and inconsequent as
that of a nightmare. Mrs. Shelley's timid hesitation between
imagination and reality, her attempt to reconcile incompatible
things and to place a creature who belongs to no earthly land in
familiar surroundings, prevents _Frankenstein_ from being a
wholly satisfactory and alarming novel of terror. She loves the
fantastic, but she also fears it. She is weighted down by
commonsense, and so flutters instead of soaring, unwilling to
trust herself far from the material world. But the fact that she
was able to vivify her grotesque skeleton of a plot with some
degree of success is no mean tribute to her gifts. The energy and
vigour of her style, her complete and serious absorption in her
subject, carry us safely over many an absurdity. It is only in
the duller stretches of the narrative, when her heart is not in
her work, that her language becomes vague, indeterminate and
blurred, and that she muffles her thoughts in words like
"ascertain," "commencement," "peruse," "diffuse," instead of
using their simpler Saxon equivalents. Stirred by the excitement
of the events she describes, she can write forcibly in simple,
direct language. She often frames short, hurried sentences such
as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or
with recollections of terror. The final impression that
_Frankenstein_ leaves with us is not easy to define, because the
book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work
of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a
plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it
continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet
when all its faults have been laid bare, the fact remains that
few readers would abandon the story half-way through. Mrs.
Shelley is so thoroughly engrossed in her theme that she impels
her readers onward, even though they may think but meanly of her
story as a work of art.

Mrs. Shelley's second novel, _Valperga, or the Life and
Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca_, published in 1823,
was a work on which she bestowed much care and labour, but the
result proves that she writes b