UK’s Miranda Seymour on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein for Halloween

This week on a Halloween edition of “The Learning Curve," guest host Mary Z. Connaughton talks with Miranda Seymour, novelist and definitive biographer of Mary Shelley, author of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Ms. Seymour shares some of the main features of Shelley’s brilliant and tragedy-filled life that the general public and students should know more about, starting with her parents, who were gifted late 18th-century writers and radical thinkers. Ms. Seymour recounts the dramatic origin story of Frankenstein, influenced by Shelley’s circle of Romantic poets and intellectuals. They explore the novel’s cautionary lessons about the excesses of human pride; modern science, and medicine; and about humanity, loneliness, and education. Ms. Seymour also describes Shelley’s personal life, and why she remains compelling in our era. Ms. Seymour concludes the interview with a reading from her Mary Shelley biography.

Stories of the Week: News reports of declining performance nationwide on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the Nation's Report Card, point the finger at pandemic school closures - but is there more to the story? Cara and Gerard offer insights.

Guest:

Miranda Seymour is an English novelist, biographer, and critic. She has been a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Seymour’s works include biographies of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mary Shelley, and Robert Graves, about whom she also wrote a novel, The Telling and a radio play, Sea Music. She wrote a group portrait of Henry James in his later years, entitled A Ring of Conspirators. In 2008 she published In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love, which won the 2008 PEN Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year. Seymour's In Byron's Wake covers the lives of Lord Byron's wife and daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace. She lives both in London and at her family’s ancestral home in Nottinghamshire, Thrumpton Hall.

The next episode will air on November 2nd, with Dr. Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.

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The Washington Post: Scores fall coast to coast, especially in math, under pandemic’s toll