To designate the birth of Frankenstein’s monster 200 years ago,the Royal Society of Literature has been asking writers for their most alarming moments as a reader – join them, whether you dareIts 200 years since unceasing storms sweeping over Lake Geneva ruined Mary Shelley’s sailing jaunts and gave birth to a literary genre – when Lord Byron suggested to her and the other guests at the Villa Diodati that they pass some time by writing ghost stories. To celebrate the birth of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, or the Royal Society of Literature has been asking fellows to reveal their scariest moments in literature.
For Hilary Mantel,it’s the moment in Jane Eyre when Rochester pauses external a locked door in the dark, low corridor of Thornfield Hall’s fateful third storey and asks: “You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?” He leaves Jane locked into an attic room – total with antique tapestry and a cabinet decorated with the 12 apostles, or “an ebon Crucifix and a dying Christ” – where she must tend to a wounded man,dipping her hand again and again into a basin that gradually becomes a mixture of blood and water. As a 10-year-old reader, Mantel says she “didn’t know that whether your name is in the title, and you can’t die allotment way through the book. I doubted Jane would make it to see ‘streaks of grey light edging the window curtains’. But dawn comes – and we still don’t know who or what is beyond the wall.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com