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The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
The passionate story of Elizabeth Lavenza, a girl rescued from poverty and raised by a remarkable noblewoman of Geneva, describes how the demise of her sensual bond with Victor Frankenstein sends him hurtling into a secret life, and along a path of destruction. Reprint.
440 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Theodore Roszak
63 books147 followersTheodore Roszak was Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.
Roszak first came to public prominence in 1969, with the publication of his The Making of a Counter Culture[5] which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. He is generally credited with the first use of the term "counterculture".
Roszak first came to public prominence in 1969, with the publication of his The Making of a Counter Culture[5] which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. He is generally credited with the first use of the term "counterculture".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
May 12, 2017
First of all, let me say that this novel is well written (although a bit repetitive). The male author produces a very believable female voice which is distinct from the voice of the persnickety “editor” – not many authors can do that.
Readers of many books, for example Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” will be familiar with the Druidic concept of “The Great Marriage”, “Marriage With the Land”, or “The Sacred Marriage” as Dan Brown calls it in “The DaVinci Code”. In this novel, Baroness Frankenstein, mother of Victor and adopted mother of Elizabeth tries to indoctrinate her pre-teen step-siblings into the Druidic mysteries / tantric sex rites / alchemical ceremonies to further “The Great Work” of “The Chymical Marriage”. So, the author describes in great detail how these two kids are encouraged and instructed in how to perform these esoteric sex acts while the adult teachers look on. Somehow this was supposed to further alchemical outcomes, like producing the philosopher’s stone, but I never understood that part.
Elizabeth’s journal tells how she was systematically brainwashed and raped over and over again at the direction of her mother. Think this description is too harsh, that it was in the name of religion and divine mysteries? Just imagine that the leader was the father instead.
Readers of many books, for example Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” will be familiar with the Druidic concept of “The Great Marriage”, “Marriage With the Land”, or “The Sacred Marriage” as Dan Brown calls it in “The DaVinci Code”. In this novel, Baroness Frankenstein, mother of Victor and adopted mother of Elizabeth tries to indoctrinate her pre-teen step-siblings into the Druidic mysteries / tantric sex rites / alchemical ceremonies to further “The Great Work” of “The Chymical Marriage”. So, the author describes in great detail how these two kids are encouraged and instructed in how to perform these esoteric sex acts while the adult teachers look on. Somehow this was supposed to further alchemical outcomes, like producing the philosopher’s stone, but I never understood that part.
Elizabeth’s journal tells how she was systematically brainwashed and raped over and over again at the direction of her mother. Think this description is too harsh, that it was in the name of religion and divine mysteries? Just imagine that the leader was the father instead.
July 4, 2017
Finally, the truth about Victor Frankenstein's wife! Witches dance naked in the woods, a crone masturbates a teenage boy with the aid of her familiar, bizarre sex rites, and a woman looks into the face of a miscarried fetus and sees the face of the monster Frankenstein. A must read! I can't believe it was written by a man!
April 25, 2007
--From Publishers weekly.
How ironic that a woman who wrote as a man should, after nearly 200 years, be given such ardent voice by a man writing as a woman.
How ironic that a woman who wrote as a man should, after nearly 200 years, be given such ardent voice by a man writing as a woman.
October 18, 2014
i read the hardcover version years ago, and to this day it is one of my favorite books of all time. such a beautiful concept of the 'flipside' of a classic novel without changing the original story's meaning or character. the story is retold from the view of the mad doctor's wife and is such a compelling and vivid story of her childhood and life leading up to the creation of the monster and the eventual outcome but also manages to feel completely original due to all the non-frankenstein story lines. this is one of the books i recommend to anyone asking for a suggestion of something interesting to read. now a period piece, but with the feel of a true memoir that was written back when. really well written, something you don't want to put down no matter how much you're yawning in bed late at night. 'reliving' this woman's struggle to understand what is happening around her while the reader knows full well what will happen gives this book such a weird feeling of sympathy for what she goes through and a feeling if suspense in how she will discover it and how it will affect her after all the other things she has been put through in life. the story itself is such a brilliant idea that people should give it a read.
June 10, 2013
If you like memoirs, fictionalized in part or wholly, you will enjoy this book. I was capt ivated by the woman's story especially because it is in her own words. Knowing she's doomed, stays for love of the one who unknowingly fashions her fate. Gripping from beginning to end.
August 13, 2007
A little strange but entertaining. A fun read.
October 23, 2014
Where do I begin? It has been some years since I read Mary Shelley's original tale of the monster. Within those pages, I found a man whose hubris to attain god-like power over life and death to be tempered with the anguish of losing those he loved most to death. This, then, was what I took from Frankenstein. Victor was a monster, but one with the best of intentions.
This volume leaves me somewhat disturbed. I'm not sure where exactly he got the idea that anything in his book could be remotely connected to the original story except by the environs and the characters he made use of. While I freely admit that I found the notion of women practicing their own forms of freedom during the Enlightenment quite compelling, and I actually liked having the grandmasters of the movement name dropped throughout the tale to give it some weight as to the era, I simply could not bring myself to associate the story with Shelley's original work. To me, Elizabeth was an innocent that was sacrificed to Victor's hubris. There was nothing to indicate she nor her adopted mother were cunning women. The Victor in the original tale was flawed, but also good-hearted and quite conflicted. The Victor in this story is arrogant, cold, and flails back and forth between knowing he's all powerful and being a raging coward at the end. I also find it hard to believe that he, as originally written, would be drawn at all to the esoteric arts, as much of a man of science as he was portrayed. The rape of Elizabeth, her subsequent miscarriage, and her long sojourn as a wild woman of the woods also threw me -- it seems too fantastical to apply to Shelley's original character.
It was an interesting book, but I think it would have been better had it been the writer's own characters and not those of Shelley's universe. I realize that he is an authority on Shelley, and has many accolades to his name, but this is my opinion of his version of the tale.
This volume leaves me somewhat disturbed. I'm not sure where exactly he got the idea that anything in his book could be remotely connected to the original story except by the environs and the characters he made use of. While I freely admit that I found the notion of women practicing their own forms of freedom during the Enlightenment quite compelling, and I actually liked having the grandmasters of the movement name dropped throughout the tale to give it some weight as to the era, I simply could not bring myself to associate the story with Shelley's original work. To me, Elizabeth was an innocent that was sacrificed to Victor's hubris. There was nothing to indicate she nor her adopted mother were cunning women. The Victor in the original tale was flawed, but also good-hearted and quite conflicted. The Victor in this story is arrogant, cold, and flails back and forth between knowing he's all powerful and being a raging coward at the end. I also find it hard to believe that he, as originally written, would be drawn at all to the esoteric arts, as much of a man of science as he was portrayed. The rape of Elizabeth, her subsequent miscarriage, and her long sojourn as a wild woman of the woods also threw me -- it seems too fantastical to apply to Shelley's original character.
It was an interesting book, but I think it would have been better had it been the writer's own characters and not those of Shelley's universe. I realize that he is an authority on Shelley, and has many accolades to his name, but this is my opinion of his version of the tale.
September 3, 2023
All this book has offered was mansplaining, manipulation, manslaughter. In the most literal sense.
I thought grotesqueness of Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was enough of a crazy ride to pronounce it the most hilarious and awful adaptation of Frankenstein.
It was until I read this book.
Dark descent was "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life full of hilarious plot holes, disturbing takes and anything but strong female characters, written by a woman. This book is again a "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life, which we see through gaze of male author, where rape, incest, disturbing practices and madness is seen as the female empowerment. Oh, and children being groomed and brainwashed into horrible, horrible sexual practices is seen as feminist and according to nature too.
The later part of book was… easier to read I think? It was now less about grooming children and more about Elizabeth’s descent into madness (wow so feminist) + basically Frankenstein retold from her perspective. If the whole book was written like the last two parts then I’d gladly give it even 4 stars. However, the disturbing things this book is calling "natural" and "power of women" makes it utter catastrophe.
Was it worse than DD? This one was at least solidly written, but the disturbing stuff is a huge turn off. If we not take those disturbing things into consideration then sure, it’s better than Dark Descent. However I believe the both books deserve to burn in fiery pits of hell and be forgotten about.
To conclude, was this book necessary? It didn’t add anything to Mary Shelley’s book, it didn’t give any conclusion, any pleasure to read. All I got was disgusting male perversion and fantasies of female rape, cult brainwashing and incest. Never again.
I thought grotesqueness of Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was enough of a crazy ride to pronounce it the most hilarious and awful adaptation of Frankenstein.
It was until I read this book.
Dark descent was "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life full of hilarious plot holes, disturbing takes and anything but strong female characters, written by a woman. This book is again a "feminist, empowering" take on Elizabeth’s life, which we see through gaze of male author, where rape, incest, disturbing practices and madness is seen as the female empowerment. Oh, and children being groomed and brainwashed into horrible, horrible sexual practices is seen as feminist and according to nature too.
The later part of book was… easier to read I think? It was now less about grooming children and more about Elizabeth’s descent into madness (wow so feminist) + basically Frankenstein retold from her perspective. If the whole book was written like the last two parts then I’d gladly give it even 4 stars. However, the disturbing things this book is calling "natural" and "power of women" makes it utter catastrophe.
Was it worse than DD? This one was at least solidly written, but the disturbing stuff is a huge turn off. If we not take those disturbing things into consideration then sure, it’s better than Dark Descent. However I believe the both books deserve to burn in fiery pits of hell and be forgotten about.
To conclude, was this book necessary? It didn’t add anything to Mary Shelley’s book, it didn’t give any conclusion, any pleasure to read. All I got was disgusting male perversion and fantasies of female rape, cult brainwashing and incest. Never again.
November 7, 2017
This was an interesting book. The reader gets a chance to find out about Elizabeth's life, from her birth to death. I was hoping to get some insight into Victor. What motivated him to do the things he did? But this was Elizabeth's story to tell, her discoveries, her thoughts, her emotions. The book could have used some editing. There was a section of the book that I thought was strange and out of place. But, in spite of that, it was a fascinating look at a story that has endured and captured our imagination for over a century.
June 27, 2019
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein By Theodore Roszak
This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.
To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives.
It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.
The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.
There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden.
That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work.
In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on.
The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification.
Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.
This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.
It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure.
There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend.
It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.
I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.
Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.
This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.
To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives.
It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.
The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.
There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden.
That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work.
In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on.
The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification.
Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.
This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.
It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure.
There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend.
It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.
I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.
Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.
July 30, 2022
I had high hopes for this. It was an erotic retelling of a classic horror story.
April 11, 2009
Interesting look at the story from another point of view. Very much about the power of women. My favorite quote "The blood is our strength, for it is the power of the heavens and the Earth within us"
March 12, 2019
Masterful use of language! I love this book, if, for no other reason, than it is delicious to read. Theodore Roszak's prose is polished so beautifully, it fairly GLEAMS!! I think Mary Shelley would be proud...
January 7, 2022
Honestly, worst book I've ever read! I don't understand why men think that writing rape scenes and having women dancing naked in the forest and having a menstrual cycle ritual is somehow supporting women! I'm sorry but a period is NOT this pagan rite of passage that he writes! He's fucking stupid!
October 5, 2011
I agree with the review that said the last 50 pages were the best. The book did not have much to do with the Frankenstein novel.
November 3, 2015
I enjoyed it - even though I knew how it would end. I think the author did a great job with his research of the time period, and explaining why people in the original did what they did.
May 22, 2019
Racist, classist, presumptuous, gender-essentialist mansplaining with a pervasive air of sexual violence. DNF.
July 6, 2020
I really enjoyed this book. It was so much more than I had thought it would be.
December 12, 2023
"I take up my pen in a dark hour."
Mary Shelley did not pen Frankenstein at 18 years old just for some dude generations later to make Victor & his wife part of a sex cult.
Mary Shelley did not pen Frankenstein at 18 years old just for some dude generations later to make Victor & his wife part of a sex cult.
February 7, 2020
Un ouvrage dense et dérangeant par bien des aspects. Toute la partie portant sur la période alchimique m'a dérangée au plus haut point. Je n'ai cependant pu me résoudre à stopper la lecture.
Pour moi, ce livre n'a rien de féministe... les passages décrivant tout le cheminement vers le Grand Œuvre, le mesmérisme et la société secrète des femmes... sortent tout droit des fantasmes masculins de l'auteur.
Je m'attendais à tout autre chose.
Pour moi, ce livre n'a rien de féministe... les passages décrivant tout le cheminement vers le Grand Œuvre, le mesmérisme et la société secrète des femmes... sortent tout droit des fantasmes masculins de l'auteur.
Je m'attendais à tout autre chose.
September 2, 2024
Читаю уже не первую ревизию романа Мери Шелли и не первую феминистскую версию, покой монстру и Франкенштейну только снится. Странный роман, в котором автор увлекается и нередко черту между излишним любованием гениталий и их функциональностью переходит, приправа в виде алхимических теорий слабовата, чтобы скрыть удовольствие, с каким это описывается. К чему все затевалось, если не за этим, мне не ясно.
December 3, 2025
I really wanted to like this book. It seemed like an interesting idea. I found it instead to be ... boring until the last quarter. I liked the style of the diary entries with the fictitious narrator filling in details. It was intriguing that the author was writing from a female POV, when Mary Shelley wrote from a male POV, but it just didn't matter to the story - except that is probably the reason for winning the Tiptree Award. This was more a tale of sexual politics than science fiction.
January 1, 2021
Abandonné au bout de 160 pages. Les femmes sont présentées comme des manipulatrices perverses dont les hommes n'ont pas besoin de respecter le consentement parce qu'évidemment elles veulent être agressées sexuellement, même quand elles disent le contraire... Écœurant. Je ne comprends pas que ce livre soit réputé féministe.
October 8, 2025
Never has an act of literature so completely captivated me from front to back. It had everything. It was thoroughly repulsive, romantic, insightful, feminist, comedic, realistic, unrealistic, times where the realism bounced between lines and I couldn’t say what could genuinely happen or not…
So good. So so good
So good. So so good
November 20, 2024
Ahahahahahahaha! This book is an absolute joke! And I would actually give it 0 stars. This book is full of rape, grooming and abuse! And people call it a book that supports feminism! I'm sorry that there are people out there who actually like this book! DNF!
February 14, 2018
A very strange book. A little drawn out in my opinion. Not sure that it added anything to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
October 17, 2018
What a strange and twisted Gothic tale.
April 21, 2020
Frankenstein with a woman's perspective. Filled with Nature and magic.
May 12, 2020
Tiptree winner 1995
August 16, 2020
Amazing. This book takes into the life of Elizabeth Frankenstein and we see another side to beast and into understanding Frankenstein a bit better.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews