Le forum d'ActuSF.com

‘‘I’ve just turned in the final draft of a new novel, Pride and Prometheus, based on my earlier story of that title. At one point I was very self-conscious about the number of stories I’ve written that bor­rowed from very famous writers. ‘Another Orphan’ was a Moby-Dick story. I did a Raymond Chandler story. I wrote a sequel to Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and a story about Mrs. Gulliver. I imagine people saying, ‘Kessel has read too much literature and can’t come up with any of his own ideas.’ Be that as it may, it occurred to me that Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and Frankenstein in 1818, yet I seldom saw any discussion that put the two books together. Even though Jane Austen was older than Mary Shelley they come out of the same time period, yet they wrote very different books. In re-reading Pride and Prejudice I noticed that Darcy’s estate Pemberley is in Derbyshire, not far from the town of Matlock. In Frankenstein, which I was also teaching at the same time, Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry are traveling through England and they stop in the town of Matlock. I thought, ‘Whoa, that was really fortuitous.’ It’s possible that characters from Pride and Prejudice could meet Victor Franken­stein without much trouble. That got me going.”