An authority on horticulture, Loudon was impressed by Webb’s futuristic imagining of a steam-driven plow, and with in a year, the two were married. Among the favorable review of The Mummy was one by John C. However, the story does have a romantic ending - at least for the scientifically minded. Orphaned and penniless at 17, Jane Webb turned to writing as one of the few ways available to women to earn a living. In contrast, the story of The Mummy’s genesis could not be more prosaic.
I saw-with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. During the “wet uncongenial summer” of 1816, the bored guests at the Villa Diodati spent an evening responding to Byron’s challenge, “We will each write a ghost story.” As Shelley describes in her preface to the 1831 version of her novel, “Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. The story of Frankenstein’s genesis is well-known. But both women shared a conviction about a women’s place in the scientific world that was completely at odds with the nineteenth-century stereotype of a “lady scribbler.” Jane Webb’s The Mummy is treated more as a curiosity indeed she is better known as a garden writer under her married name, Jane C. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so well known that she is often (rightly) credited with being the mother of science fiction.
Of the three iconic literary monsters of the nineteenth century, two of them were created by women writers.
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