Lita Judge
About Author
Lita Judge is the author and illustrator of over 20 fiction and non-fiction picture books. Her books have received numerous awards including the Sterling North Award, the Jane Addams Honor, ALA Notable and Kirkus Best of.
She enjoys teaching both writing and illustration to students of all ages and shares much about her creative process in classrooms and on her blog and website.
Lita lives with her husband, two cats and a little green parrot in New Hampshire, US.
Author link
Interview
MARY'S MONSTER
HACHETTE CHILDREN'S BOOKS
MARCH 2018
This year is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - or 'The Modern Prometheus' - and Lita Judge's compelling account of Mary Shelly's life explores the layers of experiences that led to the young author writing her extraordinary, ground-breaking novel.
It is a perceptive account of hardship, heartache and the consequences of decisions made when Mary Shelley was no more than a teenager, drawing on Shelley's diaries and supported by Lita Judge's beautifully-depicted illustrations.
Here, we asked LITA JUDGE to tell us more about how MARY's MONSTER came about.
Q: Why did you want to write about Mary Shelley's life, and why did you feel it was important to make it accessible to young adults?
A: Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, has been in print for 200 years and remains one of the most read books in history. But very few people know much about Mary. The truth is she was a radical teenage girl who survived and overcame unbelievable sorrow, isolation, cruelty, and obstacles, in order to create her work. She was cast out by her father, emotionally abused by the man she loved, and she faced the inconsolable losses of her children and her sister before she penned her novel.
She helped set in motion the feminist movement by defying the restrictions society imposed upon women. She dared to challenge tyrannical power, unjust wars, slavery, and neglect of the poor in her book. She changed the course of literature by inventing the Industrial Age science fiction novel, and delivered the most iconic monster ever created.
I wanted others, especially young adult women, to know of this remarkable girl.
Q: Can you tell us how the unusual format came about - an illustrated diary / poem, told by Mary, and with the Prologue and Epilogue told by The Creature.
A: Mary told her novel in three voices: the Creature's, Victor Frankenstein's, and Walton's, (the Arctic explorer). I wanted to honour and parallel Mary's innovative storytelling by using two dramatic voices, that of her creature and herself. And the notes felt critical for conveying how each poem and piece of art grew out of her own letters, diaries, and other historical accounts of her life. I wanted readers to be able to see why I drew the conclusions I made and how I built the story. I also chose to give the creature a voice because I wanted to honour the significance of a character that continues to live in all of our imaginations, 200 years after its inception.
I knew my book had to have a different format from what we've seen before to honour that Mary Shelley invented a new genre. A graphic novel, with the inherent white space around the art, would not have worked to create illustrations where I wanted readers to pause and take in the emotional resonance of the story. I needed to create art that filled the page and would therefore be uninterrupted by a neighbouring image or white space. The first person poems felt essential for capturing the strength and resilience of this teenage girl. Like a picture book, Mary's Monster is a dance between words and art, where each medium takes a turn at telling the story and the two become inseparable.
Q: Why did you decide to make the focus of the book how Mary's experiences drove her to create The Modern Prometheus, or Frankenstein?
A: Every single one of us knows Mary's creature. He has become a cultural icon. But that creature has been distorted and altered by later retellings. I thought an origin story about the creation of Frankenstein would get back to truth of what Mary intended with her novel. The novel itself is radical and groundbreaking for its ability to prompt debate on the ethical implications of scientific advancement, and its social criticisms about the consequences our actions have on others.
It is also incredibly fascinating how Mary's life paralleled the story - from her youth, growing up near the Holborn slaughterhouses, and the prison where scientists were performing grizzly experiments to bring dead convicts back to life. Also her own rejection by her father parallels that of the creature being rejected by Victor Frankenstein (ultimately his father figure). Even the fact that the eruption of an epic volcano the year before she started writing the novel unleashed a torrent of lightning storms. All of these details in her life give us a rich understanding of the layer upon layers of meaning she put into Frankenstein.
Q: Can you remember first reading Frankenstein / The Modern Prometheus - or did you first see a film of it - and the impact it had on you?
A: I came late to the book. I think perhaps, because I saw a film first which didn't speak to me. When I did read the novel, I was bowled over by the how much more meaningful the story was. It spoke to me on so many levels. But what also spoke to me was the knowledge that Mary was 18 when she began to write it.
I had to know more about how a teenager could write something so revolutionary, empathetic, and relevant even by modern standards. I became somewhat obsessed with discovering how and why she wrote it, I think perhaps because I was searching for strength I needed in my own life to overcome some challenges, and her strength, conveyed through her story, really became pivotal to me.
Q: How personal a project was this to you?
A: It was incredibly personal. Life-altering in fact. When I read Frankenstein, I was suffering from an autoimmune illness that left me unable to walk, or have much use of my hands. I was unable to work, and most days, unable to get out of bed. I was undergoing chemotherapy which left me feeling dreadful, but even more, feeling very isolated because it forced me to stop my life.
Mary's book is all about isolation and suffering. I knew the author behind it must have faced her own challenges. I searched and found a copy of her journals while trying to learn more about the girl behind the novel. In so doing, I discovered a girl of such brilliant strength and perseverance, it felt connected to my own recovery. I swore if I ever recovered enough to create again, I would tell her story. I'm grateful and forever changed by the fact I got to do just that.
Q: How much research did you need to do into Mary's life to develop her voice and how did you decide which parts of her experiences to include or not?
A: I did a copious amount of research because I wanted to get it right. I read every letter I could find that she wrote and every journal entry. I read biographies about her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (the founder of feminism), and her father, William Godwin. I read Percy Shelley's poetry, and that of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and other romantic poets to understand what they were doing. I read about the Napoleonic wars, English politics of the early 1800's, Humphrey Davies, galvanism, Scottish Politics, scientific descriptions of the volcanic eruption of 1815, descriptions of the neighborhood in Holborn where Mary lived, and the experiments being performed on convicts. I read anything I could find about the time and travelled to many of the locations in the book. Only then did I feel I could speak her voice. I chose to focus on details that I felt directly related to her creating her novel.
Q: Were there parts of her life that were harder to research or to explain?
A: Yes, her relationship with her step sister, Claire, was very hard to understand with depth enough to write. Most historians believe that Claire and Percy Shelley had an affair soon after Mary lost her first child. Claire fuelled these rumours after Shelley's death, but understanding how Mary felt was a challenge. Why didn't she immediately kick Claire out of the house?
There were a lot of secondhand sources on the topic of Claire and Percy's relationship, but nothing directly from Mary. She did, however, later write letters to Percy (when he was away) where she revealed her fears that he was leaving her for his former wife, or for Claire. Mary herself ripped the pages out of her journal over the time period when most historians believe Claire and Shelley were having the physical affair. It was the only time she destroyed pages of her journal. In the end, I felt that Mary's silent act spoke volumes about how she felt.
Q: I understand you also travelled part of Mary and Percy Shelley's route through Europe, how did this help you understand her experiences and writing?
A: It gave me an understanding of how challenging that journey must have been physically, but also how much it must have shaped her understanding. It also made it possible for me to bring the illustrations to life.
Q: You also illustrate the book, how important was this for you as part of its creation process? What layers does it add to your biography of Mary Shelley?
A: I think the illustrations are my way of showing the multiple facets of the truth. The art tells so much of Mary's emotional journey. To me, the illustrations are key to understanding the depth of her sorrow, her strength and her resilience.
I think they also reveal her creative imagination. Through the art, I tried to convey how she poured everything she endured into her creation. The relationship expressed in the art between her and her Creature wouldn't have come through in words. Mary described finishing her book as though she were looking into the eyes of another offspring, that of her Creature. Only through art could I show the intense act that bringing him to life must have been for her. I think she was saving herself when she was creating him.
Q: How much harder did the illustrations make it for you to create your book?
A: Endlessly harder. Just the logistics of painting that many paintings where the depiction of the figures is very realistic, not stylized as in a graphic novel, was a ton of work. But also, I didn't write this story before illustrating it. I think through drawing. The story unfolds visually for me. So that meant a lot of revising in the drawings. There were thousands and thousands of drawings I had to do to get the final paintings for this book.
Q: Did creating Mary's Monster change your views of Mary or those in her life?
A: I came into this story as a huge admirer of Mary Shelley's work. But following her life so closely only made my admiration grow. My attitude toward Percy Shelley changed the most. Before I began I had romantic notions about Mary's poet. But to find that he was so emotionally abusive toward her and that he left his pregnant wife, abandoned and alone, made me hate him. But the more I searched for the truth, the more I began to pity him, because he was obviously mentally ill and facing his own tragic sorrows.
Q: What would you like your readers to take away from Mary's Monster?
A: First, envision the life you want for yourself rather than allowing others to envision it for you. Mary faced huge obstacles just to live an intellectual life - to become an author in a time when few women were educated. But she refused to let others define what she would become. Second, tell your stories. It is our stories that connect us to others, that allow us to be understood, and to understand others. Create from your pain, and strength, and mistakes, and victories, and use that creativity to enrich the lives of others.
Q: Will you be following this with other illustrated titles for young adults?
A: I hope so. I am working on one now, though I'm not ready to reveal who I'm writing about. But it is another remarkable young woman, who I personally feel indebted to for the work she created and the changes she brought forth.
Q: Where do you work and what are you writing or illustrating now?
A: I live in the New Hampshire woods here in the US, and have a studio attached to my house that looks like a big red barn on the outside, but more like a church on the inside. It has a huge twelve-foot-tall salvaged window from a church. My studio is my church. My art is my faith.
I am currently working on the 'new' illustrated novel, as well as a picture book about facing our fears and turning inward to tap into our imaginations which can fuel our strength. Its title is Wingbeats and I am very excited about it.
Mary's Monster: Love, Madness and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein
