Image: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White, Penguin 2018. Cover design by Regina Flath. Cover photograph copyright © 2018 by Christine Blackburne. Photograph of book itself taken by me. Image used by on this blog under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.
As soon as I saw the cover (on Insta, I think), I knew I wanted to read this book. I love a reimagined classic, and this one with its hints of feminist subversion and a recentred narrative was right up my alley.
The main character and narrator is Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor Frankenstein’s adopted cousin in Mary Shelley’s classic novel. In the original, Elizabeth is impossibly sweet, perfect and docile, every inch ‘the angel in the house’, so Kiersten White had a lot of gaps and silences to work with. In her retelling, Elizabeth is calculating, a poor girl who will do anything to keep from returning to her abusive childhood home. She makes herself indispensable to the Frankenstein family and particularly to Victor. Even when she finds out about Victor’s terrible experiments, she does her best to cover them up. But events take an even more dreadful, murderous turn, and what we know about the characters of the original novel starts to shift and change in interesting and creepy ways.
It’s a dark novel (unsurprisingly), but I was able to read it – and I can’t manage true horror – so it’s not too intense. There is violence and there is abuse: domestic and psychological. There are also moments of humour and a fair bit of action. The female characters are given a lot more agency, obviously, than in the original, and it’s certainly a feminist retelling, with an implicit (sometimes explicit) awareness of the patriarchal confinement and control of nineteenth century women.*
It’s not literary fiction, but it is well written and could be a suitable related text for Texts and Human Experiences. (If Frankenstein wasn’t on the prescribed list, it would also be fabulous for the 11 Extension 1 independent project… but it is, so it’s off limits.) It would also, obviously, make a great wide reading text for someone studying Frankenstein or just anyone who enjoys dark sci-fi in a historical setting. Suitable for good readers from years 7 to 12 as long as they’re not prone to nightmares.
* I like to think Shelley would approve of this, given that her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the first (proto)feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in 1792.
Title: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein
Author: Kiersten White
Cover: design by Regina Flath. Cover photograph copyright © 2018 by Christine Blackburne.
Publisher: Penguin, 2018
Genre: historical sci-fi, psychological drama, literary reimagining
Representation: narrative recentred on girls & women
Suitability: years 9-12
Fyi: violence, murder, execution, blood, corpses, domestic abuse, psychological abuse, sociopathy, 19th century insane asylum practices, unjust conviction
Themes: abusive relationships, found family, scientific ethics, patriarchal oppression, friendship
Literary features: reimagining a classic, narrative recentering, feminist re-telling, first person narrator, intertextuality, motifs, analepses (flashbacks)
NSW syllabus: genre study (sci-fi); potential related text for Texts & Human Experiences; wide reading
If you like this, try: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LIBRARY... 
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