Author Description

Part 1 of 2. Mary fears she's losing the two people she most admires-her lover and her father-after she's lost her reputation. She regains them with the publication of Frankenstein. As Scott is crafting his biography of the Shelleys and Godwins a century later, he fears that he's losing his audience and his wife. He regains them with the publication of his other "work" he's authoring at the same-The Great Gatsby. As eternal celebrities of Western culture-the Shelleys, the Godwins, and the Fitzgeralds-their brief victories are dramatically retold in What Light Was as dialogues, verse, and meditations. In similar struggles a century after Scott's "Great American Novel"-as the ambitions of Romanticism are put on trial in these living love letters-we will find that it is not easy being the children of these dreamers and their illusory masterpieces.