AngelMonster is the fictionalized story of the turbulent relationship between sixteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, who had already eloped with another sixteen year old, Harriet, and had become tired of his first child-wife, sought another in Mary Godwin, daughter of a pioneer feminist mother and a philosopher father. When Mary and her lover, Shelley, ran away together, they took with them their accomplice in arranging their secretive trysts, Mary’s step-sister, Jane. Mary was pregnant with Shelley’s child when the trio absconded.

The tone of the novel, and apparently of the Shelleys’ lives, is histrionic with the characters, Mary, Percy Shelley, and Jane-who-later-changes-her-name-to-Claire, taking turns making “scenes.” Their way of life is immoral, purposefully iconoclastic, and hysterically passionate. Such choices in lifestyle naturally lead to jealousy, fits of anger and violence, depression, and wild, undisciplined exhibitions. Bennett’s Mary Shelley alternates between thinking Shelley is her angel and her saviour, and considering him to be her demon, monster, and betrayer. Add to the lack of restraint and the promiscuity of their lives a succession of tragedies: two suicides of close family members, the deaths of four out of five of the Shelleys’ young children, and the book becomes almost unbelievably tragic as one cataclysmic event follows another, spiced with doses of laudanum and liberal amounts of alcohol to dull the pain and confuse the issues.

AngelMonster is an excellent portrayal of the slavery that results when all of the rules of God and man are flouted, and only one’s passions are allowed to rule. Whether or not the author meant to write a cautionary tale, the story cannot help but warn that emotion is an inadequate governor of life’s choices. Sad, essentially true, and recommended for mature young adult readers.

The Indian Serenade by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me – who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, sweet!

The wandering airs, they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
Oh, beloved as thou art!

Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast:
Oh! Press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!

And so we begin National Poetry Month with the Poetry of Romantic Melodrama, but beautiful nonetheless.