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Poor Creatures: The fascinating story of Mary Shelley – the mind which birthed Frankenstein
The worst monsters are the human kind . . .
Dundee, 1812. Isabel Baxter awaits the arrival of Mary Godwin, a girl of fierce intelligence and grand passions, sent north to recover from a mysterious ailment. The Baxter family home, nestled in woodland by the river Tay, seems the perfect retreat. But The Cottage is a place of secrets, and Mary is no ordinary guest.
As the girls grow closer, their friendship becomes all-consuming, haunted by memory, fuelled by feverish
creativity, and shadowed by something monstrous.
Inspired by true events, this is an immersive reimagining of the young Mary Shelley before she became the
author of Frankenstein. A story of girlhood, obsession, and the birth of a literary legend.
Years before Frankenstein, this is a story of emerging womanhood and literary intrigue, exploring the many monsters in young Mary Shelley's life. From the bestselling author of Waterstones Scottish Book of the month, the Specimens, Poor Creatures is perfect for fans of Stacey Halls, Sara Sheridan and Ambrose Parry.
'Makes the historical feel present and urgent' - ZOE VENDITOZZI
Dundee, 1812. Isabel Baxter awaits the arrival of Mary Godwin, a girl of fierce intelligence and grand passions, sent north to recover from a mysterious ailment. The Baxter family home, nestled in woodland by the river Tay, seems the perfect retreat. But The Cottage is a place of secrets, and Mary is no ordinary guest.
As the girls grow closer, their friendship becomes all-consuming, haunted by memory, fuelled by feverish
creativity, and shadowed by something monstrous.
Inspired by true events, this is an immersive reimagining of the young Mary Shelley before she became the
author of Frankenstein. A story of girlhood, obsession, and the birth of a literary legend.
Years before Frankenstein, this is a story of emerging womanhood and literary intrigue, exploring the many monsters in young Mary Shelley's life. From the bestselling author of Waterstones Scottish Book of the month, the Specimens, Poor Creatures is perfect for fans of Stacey Halls, Sara Sheridan and Ambrose Parry.
'Makes the historical feel present and urgent' - ZOE VENDITOZZI
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Audible Audio
Published October 23, 2025
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About the author
Mairi Kidd
23 books34 followersMairi Kidd is Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland. She was formerly Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. She is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal's books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 15, 2025
Mairi Kidd creates an impressive monster of a historical fiction, delving into Mary Shelley's real life teenage connection to the Scottish Baxter family. Mary would form an intense relationship with their similarly aged daughter Isabella, that would seemingly drift apart in later years for historically unbeknownst reasons.
Isabella Baxter/Booth has often been accredited as a root of imagination in Mary Shelley's life, and her influence on the conception of Frankenstein has often been a source of creative inspiration in media. The title of Poor Creatures itself evokes many other works that have based themselves on the Baxter/Shelley/Frankenstein connection (Poor Things and Unfashioned Creatures to name a couple).
Kidd writes the co-dependant nature of Mary and Isabella's early relationship with such intensity, and has a remarkable skill of being able to draw out the hypothetical reality of less documented historical figures with such sympathy and skill. This is one of the first Shelley related books I have read that really questions the accepted details around the individuals involved, beyond the face value a lot of historians have taken. Poor Creatures is focused not just on Mary Shelley, but on the women that existed in her periphery, whose tragic lives often seem to be misrepresented and brushed aside in the wake of Mary and the dubiously moralled men that surrounded her. A must read for people looking to read on Shelley and the conception of Frankenstein beyond the Villa Diodati.
*Thank you to the publishers for providing a proof copy of this book for review*
Isabella Baxter/Booth has often been accredited as a root of imagination in Mary Shelley's life, and her influence on the conception of Frankenstein has often been a source of creative inspiration in media. The title of Poor Creatures itself evokes many other works that have based themselves on the Baxter/Shelley/Frankenstein connection (Poor Things and Unfashioned Creatures to name a couple).
Kidd writes the co-dependant nature of Mary and Isabella's early relationship with such intensity, and has a remarkable skill of being able to draw out the hypothetical reality of less documented historical figures with such sympathy and skill. This is one of the first Shelley related books I have read that really questions the accepted details around the individuals involved, beyond the face value a lot of historians have taken. Poor Creatures is focused not just on Mary Shelley, but on the women that existed in her periphery, whose tragic lives often seem to be misrepresented and brushed aside in the wake of Mary and the dubiously moralled men that surrounded her. A must read for people looking to read on Shelley and the conception of Frankenstein beyond the Villa Diodati.
*Thank you to the publishers for providing a proof copy of this book for review*
October 19, 2025
I saw Mairi Kidd speak at the Wigtown Book Festival last year for her novel The Specimens, so I was excited to see her back this year for Poor Creatures.
Essentially an origin story of Mary Godwin/Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the time she spent living with family friends, the Baxters, in Dundee in her mid-teens. The novel mostly focuses on her intense friendship with Isabel Baxter, later Booth, with occasional interruptions from the perspective of other women in Mary’s life, i.e. Harriet, Percy Shelley’s first wife, and Mary Jane Godwin, Mary’s stepmother. There is also a prologue from the perspective of Margaret Nicholson, a ‘madwoman’ who attempted to assassinate the king, who later became the subject of Percy Shelley’s poetry, and Rebecca, an auctioneer of antiques in the year 2025.
The structure of this book is odd, I’ll say that straight away. The jumps in perspective and time are jarring, and Kidd makes the decision to have Mary herself ‘offstage’ for the parts of her life that are most well known. She remains at the centre of the story, but we do not meet her again until after her husband’s death. On first reading, I thought, “why are we skipping the fun bit?” but the more I have thought about it, I really admire Kidd for making this jump, and reminding us that Mary’s marriage to Shelley (which covers the publication of Frankenstein) was merely one phase of her life. I also really enjoyed the chapter from Mary Jane’s perspective, which was such an interesting glimpse of a woman forgotten by history, and a clever inversion of the wicked stepmother trope which she herself is aware of- “Had her hand paused as she wrote of the stepmother condemned to dance herself to death, the iron shoes heating on the fire, and the other one, cast in her bindings into the agony of the flame?”
One of the most interesting parts of this novel is the teenage paracosm Mary and Isabel develop, featuring Lady G, the wooden doll belonged to Isabel’s mother. I read Anne of Green Gables directly before this, and while they are wildly different in tone, they are not that dissimilar, featuring intense friendships between young women with overactive imaginations. Nanny Chisholm, who cares for Isabel’s younger siblings regales the girls with Gaelic folktales, which are creepy and gothic and lots of fun. I’m pretty sure this character is fictional, but Mary must have been exposed to similar stories during her time in Scotland, as it’s easy to draw a line between these and the themes and tone of her own work.
Poor Creatures does not paint a sympathetic portrait of Mary Shelley. A large part of what Kidd spoke of at WBF, and discussed in her author’s note, is how the cult of literary celebrity that surrounded Mary and Percy Shelley, their friendship with Lord Byron, the mythos of her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was viciously nurtured to the expense of many characters Kidd tries to honour- particularly Harriet Shelley, Mary Jane Godwin, and Fanny Imley (Mary’s half sister who took her own life). The ‘poor creatures’ of this novel, including Isabel Baxter/Booth, suffer as a result of their connection to the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley set. That said, Mary is remembered as a ‘great writer’ when almost no women were. Isabel is an aspiring writer herself, whose work as a teenager bears many of the same themes of Mary Shelley’s. But as the novel progresses, Isabel is channelled into the pathway laid out for her: marriage and motherhood, and her ability to write fades away. Likewise with Mary’s stepsister Claire, her own writing is eclipsed by her confirmed affair with Byron and possible affair with Percy. Poor Creatures also exposes the hypocrisy of this group of so-called radical thinkers, who are horrified by any hint of public scandal caused by their ‘free’ behaviour, and who are unconcerned with the tragedy they leave in their wake.
Reading Poor Creatures has made me think a lot about my relationship to the novel Frankenstein. I read it at university and wrote an essay on it which really marked a turning point for me, where academic writing seemed to finally click. A huge focus of that essay was Victor Frankenstein’s obsession with reproduction without a woman’s input, during a time when a woman’s only role was to reproduce. Frankenstein was able to create life while circumventing a woman’s function, making them unnecessary, surplus. Pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and motherhood are frequent themes of horror and are also repeated threads woven through Poor Creatures. This reading was very much informed by Mary’s own, often tragic, experiences of pregnancy.
On this basis, I have always thought of Frankenstein as a feminist text, and Shelley as a feminist writer. The final section of Poor Creatures is a reunion between Mary and Isabel many years later, and their conversation is pretty gripping, and Mary’s viciousness is on full display, but so are Isabel’s regrets about how her life has turned out. I guess I don’t really know how I feel about Mary, but I really enjoyed this book, and I think it’s all the better for the nuanced and complex portrait of a writer who has been definitively enshrined as a legend.
Looooong review but this book gave me so much to think about and I’m still untangling a lot of my thoughts.
Essentially an origin story of Mary Godwin/Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the time she spent living with family friends, the Baxters, in Dundee in her mid-teens. The novel mostly focuses on her intense friendship with Isabel Baxter, later Booth, with occasional interruptions from the perspective of other women in Mary’s life, i.e. Harriet, Percy Shelley’s first wife, and Mary Jane Godwin, Mary’s stepmother. There is also a prologue from the perspective of Margaret Nicholson, a ‘madwoman’ who attempted to assassinate the king, who later became the subject of Percy Shelley’s poetry, and Rebecca, an auctioneer of antiques in the year 2025.
The structure of this book is odd, I’ll say that straight away. The jumps in perspective and time are jarring, and Kidd makes the decision to have Mary herself ‘offstage’ for the parts of her life that are most well known. She remains at the centre of the story, but we do not meet her again until after her husband’s death. On first reading, I thought, “why are we skipping the fun bit?” but the more I have thought about it, I really admire Kidd for making this jump, and reminding us that Mary’s marriage to Shelley (which covers the publication of Frankenstein) was merely one phase of her life. I also really enjoyed the chapter from Mary Jane’s perspective, which was such an interesting glimpse of a woman forgotten by history, and a clever inversion of the wicked stepmother trope which she herself is aware of- “Had her hand paused as she wrote of the stepmother condemned to dance herself to death, the iron shoes heating on the fire, and the other one, cast in her bindings into the agony of the flame?”
One of the most interesting parts of this novel is the teenage paracosm Mary and Isabel develop, featuring Lady G, the wooden doll belonged to Isabel’s mother. I read Anne of Green Gables directly before this, and while they are wildly different in tone, they are not that dissimilar, featuring intense friendships between young women with overactive imaginations. Nanny Chisholm, who cares for Isabel’s younger siblings regales the girls with Gaelic folktales, which are creepy and gothic and lots of fun. I’m pretty sure this character is fictional, but Mary must have been exposed to similar stories during her time in Scotland, as it’s easy to draw a line between these and the themes and tone of her own work.
Poor Creatures does not paint a sympathetic portrait of Mary Shelley. A large part of what Kidd spoke of at WBF, and discussed in her author’s note, is how the cult of literary celebrity that surrounded Mary and Percy Shelley, their friendship with Lord Byron, the mythos of her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was viciously nurtured to the expense of many characters Kidd tries to honour- particularly Harriet Shelley, Mary Jane Godwin, and Fanny Imley (Mary’s half sister who took her own life). The ‘poor creatures’ of this novel, including Isabel Baxter/Booth, suffer as a result of their connection to the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley set. That said, Mary is remembered as a ‘great writer’ when almost no women were. Isabel is an aspiring writer herself, whose work as a teenager bears many of the same themes of Mary Shelley’s. But as the novel progresses, Isabel is channelled into the pathway laid out for her: marriage and motherhood, and her ability to write fades away. Likewise with Mary’s stepsister Claire, her own writing is eclipsed by her confirmed affair with Byron and possible affair with Percy. Poor Creatures also exposes the hypocrisy of this group of so-called radical thinkers, who are horrified by any hint of public scandal caused by their ‘free’ behaviour, and who are unconcerned with the tragedy they leave in their wake.
Reading Poor Creatures has made me think a lot about my relationship to the novel Frankenstein. I read it at university and wrote an essay on it which really marked a turning point for me, where academic writing seemed to finally click. A huge focus of that essay was Victor Frankenstein’s obsession with reproduction without a woman’s input, during a time when a woman’s only role was to reproduce. Frankenstein was able to create life while circumventing a woman’s function, making them unnecessary, surplus. Pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and motherhood are frequent themes of horror and are also repeated threads woven through Poor Creatures. This reading was very much informed by Mary’s own, often tragic, experiences of pregnancy.
On this basis, I have always thought of Frankenstein as a feminist text, and Shelley as a feminist writer. The final section of Poor Creatures is a reunion between Mary and Isabel many years later, and their conversation is pretty gripping, and Mary’s viciousness is on full display, but so are Isabel’s regrets about how her life has turned out. I guess I don’t really know how I feel about Mary, but I really enjoyed this book, and I think it’s all the better for the nuanced and complex portrait of a writer who has been definitively enshrined as a legend.
Looooong review but this book gave me so much to think about and I’m still untangling a lot of my thoughts.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews