Conference turris::womannotes-v3

748.0. "Mary Shelly and Friends NPR Story" by DSSDEV::LEMEN () Thu Mar 28 1991 17:14

    This morning on NPR I heard a really amazing story---please
    forgive my confusion surrounding the names. I'm terrible with names,
    anyway, and I got so caught up in the story I hardly noticed them.
    
    Seems that Mary Shelley, of "Frankenstein" fame had two
    close friends: Mary Something Dodds, known as Doddy or Doddsy,
    and Isabella. Doddsy was considered to be quite homely---so homely that she
    was noted in diaries of the time as "misshapen".  Doddsy was also
    a very talented writer, and wrote under the pen name of David 
    Lindsay.
    
    Isabella, on the other hand, was a startling beauty. She was the
    illegitimate daughter of some titled person, and had not much
    money. She was as beautiful as Doddsy was homely, and, most 
    unusual for the time, she was a sexual adventuress! (I think this 
    means that she had sex without the confines of marriage.)
    
    To make a long story short, Isabella got pregnant and wanted to
    have the baby, and Doddsy was tired of having none of the benefits
    of womanhood, so they went off to France together, and Doddsy
    adopted man's clothes, and they came back to England as Mr. and Mrs.
    Walter Something-Dsomething with their child.
    
    This was not discovered until recently, when Betty Buckey,
    doing research on Mary Shelley, noticed that she had
    references to David Lindsay, Mary Doddsy, and Mr. Walter
    Dsomething, but not birth dates and death dates for all of them.
    She looked in Mary Shelley's correspondence and noticed that
    all three people signed their "D"s in a very distinctive way---that
    was exactly the same.
    
    Isn't this incredible? And, I could shoot myself because I haven't
    heard the end of the story---didn't anyone ever wonder what became
    of Doddsy? Or did she and Mary and Isabella fake her death? And
    did Isabella continue to have an interesting sex life? And what
    did people make of that?
    
    If anyone heard the rest of the story, please let me know.
    
    And I'm so proud of Doddsy---she saw that being a woman wasn't
    going to give her what she want---so she got it another way!
    
    	june
    

I guess she really liked it as a man it terms of the priveledge she
got from it - she got jobs she could not have gotten as a woman...

john

    there is a now book out about these women.  that's why the radio story.
    
    sue

    I heard that too and wrote down the title, which I really liked:
    
    	Mary Diana Dodds, A Gentleman and a Scholar
    
    What I wrote down for the author's name is Betty Bennet.
    
    Ruth (catching up on 10,000 unseen notes)