Harvester of Hearts

In the period between 1815 and 1820, Mary Shelley wrote her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, as well as its companion piece, Mathilda, a tragic incest narrative that was confiscated by her father, William Godwin, and left unpublished until 1959. She also gave birth to fourand lost threechildren. In this hybrid text, Rachel Feder interprets Frankenstein and Mathilda within a series of provocative frameworks including Shelleys experiences of motherhood and maternal loss, twentieth-century feminists interests in and attachments to Mary Shelley, and the critics own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Harvester of Hearts explores how Mary Shelleys exchanges with her childrenin utero, in birth, in life, and in deathinfuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Feder theorizes elective affinities, a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history. Feder blurs the distinctions between intellectual, bodily, literary, and personal history, reanimating the classical feminist discourse on Frankenstein by stepping into the frame. The resultat once an experimental book of literary criticism, a performative foray into feminist praxis, and a deeply personal lyric essaynot only locates Mary Shelleys monsters within the folds of maternal identity but also illuminates the connections between the literary and the quotidian.