In a marriage of geniuses, who's the main character?

Mary Shelley, Percy, and why "main character" framing actually matters

Probably it’s a little dorky to have a “favorite” writer, but I have one, and it’s Kingsley Amis, the British, post-WWII comic novelist.

I’ve read all his books—there are more than two dozen—and some I’ve read many times. Lucky Jim I revisit every few years. The Old Devils is basically perfect. Take a Girl Like You is a lost classic. I’ve also read his letters (the funniest stuff ever written, which I don’t say lightly) and Zachary Leader’s excellent biography multiple times.

So when I came across another writer I admire—Tim Kreider—praising a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife, I took notice. I trust Kreider’s taste enough to read anything he recommends, but somehow, I had never read Howard. (His post on her novel The Long View is here: Tim Kreider’s Substack, and like everything he writes, it’s worth reading.)

Then I read The Long View myself, and I was blown away. You can’t read it and fail to recognize that Howard was a genius, a major artist. It’s so stunning it’s hard to describe—unpretentious but exact prose, a structure that dazzles without announcing itself, just this slow inexorable unfolding of ordinary doom, not showy whatsoever and yet devastatingly effective. How is this not in the canon?

What surprised me most is that I thought I knew Kingsley Amis. I thought I understood his marriages. When a friend recently picked up his collected letters, I told him that if he was dipping in and out, he shouldn’t miss the letter about Amis trying to arrange an abortion for his first wife before they were married—still hair-raising stuff 70 years later. I’d write an Amis biography myself if Leader hadn’t already done it so masterfully. But I had never read Howard’s work. Despite all my fascination with Amis, I had never given her credit.

I had kind of absorbed Amis’s view—and the view of his closest friends—that she was prissy, stuffy, egoistic, and more than a little cold. And now I have this thundering realization: She may have been the greater genius all along—and this is coming from someone who considers Amis her favorite writer of all time.

This realization dovetails with my current research into Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’m rereading Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, and in her discussion of Dickens’s marriage, she asks: How many extremely clever people really find the same in their mate? Could anyone, in any era, have matched the genius and mental energy of the man who wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby at the same time? Who had five capital-G Great novels under his belt before turning 30? If such a thing ever happens, it’s rare.

And one of the very few cases where it did happen must be Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Yet, if you research their biographies for any length of time, you quickly become familiar with the dominant framing: He was one of the greatest poets of his age—maybe of all time—and she was a teenage girl who somehow wrote Frankenstein. Maybe by accident, ya know, like an asteroid that hits a junkyard and somehow the resulting pile-up forms a Boeing 747. Even the most well-intentioned attempts to highlight her side of things pale in comparison to two hundred years of her being overlooked. I find myself reading old biographies and writing “WHAT THE FUCK SHE IS THE MAIN CHARACTER YOU FOOL” in the margins.

In fact, the earliest Mary Shelley biography (from 1889) essentially says: She would be worthy of a biography just for being Shelley’s wife, but it turns out she’s sort of interesting in her own right! Think about that. She was not only not considered the main character of her marriage—she wasn’t even considered the main character of her own life.

Screenshot from the 1889 biography—my own copy is too scrawled up to share.

Which leads me to an unsettling question: If someone as glaringly brilliant as Mary Shelley can be overlooked, what else are we missing? How much of what we “know” about history is skewed, partial, or outright wrong? Maybe this question seems banal, like a faddish line of inquiry from the ‘70s, from a time when people wore a lot of polyester and smoked pot at potlucks, but I think it’s profound, expansive. And more than that, it’s not just a question of hindsight—each generation thinks it sees the full picture, but we keep discovering massive blind spots. Just look at Howard and Amis.

The “main character” question isn’t just clever framing—I legit think it’s an urgent tool for seeing what’s been right in front of us all along. The question arises naturally from history itself. Every generation re-explores the past, asking anew: Who was really driving these events? Who shaped the culture, the art, the ideas? What narratives have been buried, not because they were unimportant, but because they were inconvenient or in conflict with sentiment, received opinion, whatever people thought they knew?

Like, “main character” framing could seem like a trendy TikTok idea with extremely limited historical application—but in this case, it breaks the whole damn case open. It forces a reevaluation exactly where it’s needed most. It’s not about imposing a meme onto history. It’s about history straight-up demanding a second look, a reconsideration, a re-adjudication of who really mattered.

And maybe the personal frustration I feel, scrawling “WHAT THE FUCK” in the margins of old biographies, is part of a much larger pattern. This isn’t just about rediscovering overlooked figures—it’s about recognizing how history itself is shaped by power, perspective, and who gets to decide the story in the first place. And if we can’t even get history right—when we have extensive records, plus generations of scholarship, archival research, and analysis, plus a firmly established sense of sociocultural events leading up to and following the moment we’re examining—what are the chances we haven’t completely missed the plot of our own age?

As always, thanks for reading—reading, in this case, a little bit of my current Shelley research. Longer piece to come soon. In the meantime, please tell me your feelings in the comments, and if you would, like and share so that we can draw other people into the drama.

Cat