She first touched my life on Christmas evening of 1963. After Sunday, December 17th, 1967, I began to know her a little better while reading an early gift I received, a paperback copy of Frankenstein. In the summer of 1975, I read her journal and letters; and, in a way, fell in love with her, despite the snide comments attached to those three volumes by their editor, Frederick L. Jones. At the beginning of the summer of 1977, I learned how out of favor she was, at the time, in the academic world when an English professor whose class I had taken in the spring term of my Freshman collegiate year returned my paper by mail: when I showed it to my high school mentor (then Chairman of the High School English department and believed by many to be the most powerful teacher in the district), she told me that, in all of her years as both a teacher and a student, she had never seen a paper so savagely brutalized by an instructor. In the spring of 1978, in the spring term of my Sophomore year, I did my Sophomore project (one of two major projects required to graduate; the other was the Senior Thesis itself) on her, despite heavy pressure from my departmental advisor, his colleagues, and some of my classmates that she was undeserving of academic attention. I defied them all and completed the project which was deemed acceptable and passed, although its subject was broadly ridiculed; and, twenty-three years later at a private reunion luncheon, my defiance still received a comment.
She inspired me to want to be a writer. I did not know, then, that I would eventually turn to Poetry (on October 13th, 1975); but I am a Poet because I wanted to be a writer because I was so inspired by Mary Shelley. I owe her so much more than this poem.
