Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein

Anna Trevor, a young American scholar, is preparing a controversial paper on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While asleep, Anna falls into alarmingly realistic dreams, meeting Mary and learning the truths that only the author herself could know. In England, where Anna has come to present her paper, synchronicity and seeming coincidence abound. While staying with her cousin, Rose, Anna learns of a fragile ancestral tie to the Shelleys. She travels to Manesbrook Manor to meet ninety-four-year-old Auntie Francis, who claims to have been intimate with remnants of the Shelley family and speaks of writings never made available to scholars. When Taylor's brother-in-law, Peter, arrives, Anna's dreams spill over into her waking state, and she begins to believe that Mary and her legendary lovers, the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, actually exist as conscious beings sharing time and space with her.