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emma_in_dreamI must begin with a confession - I’ve only had time to read bits of this novel. It’s long but fascinating. To start with, I had no idea that the mummy genre started with Louden. She is like Mary Shelley with her Frankenstein or Bram Stoker with her Dracula. And yet so much less well known.
Louden was born to a middle class family but her father lost his fortune and she saw that ‘on the winding up of his affairs that it would be necessary to do something for my support. I had written a strange, wild novel, called the Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive.’ It was published in 1827 and through the work she met her future husband, who was a botonist. Her later works were mostly very popular ladies’ guides to gardening and botony.
Having done no reading at all, I would hazard that factors affecting her choice of genre were the general popularity of the Egyptian in the regency and 1820s, and the publication of *Frankenstein* the year before.
She doesn’t go in the same direction as Shelley though, in that her focus is not on the broader philosophical aspects of the creature but on her scientific predictions for the future (including steam-driven diggers!).
Louden was born to a middle class family but her father lost his fortune and she saw that ‘on the winding up of his affairs that it would be necessary to do something for my support. I had written a strange, wild novel, called the Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive.’ It was published in 1827 and through the work she met her future husband, who was a botonist. Her later works were mostly very popular ladies’ guides to gardening and botony.
Having done no reading at all, I would hazard that factors affecting her choice of genre were the general popularity of the Egyptian in the regency and 1820s, and the publication of *Frankenstein* the year before.
She doesn’t go in the same direction as Shelley though, in that her focus is not on the broader philosophical aspects of the creature but on her scientific predictions for the future (including steam-driven diggers!).
