God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (23 page)

never

lave been

a

about a dead person I've interviewed, but now is the time. Let's see how smart you are about the history of big ideas.

For starters: This former Earthling, although not quite twenty, published an idea as persistent in the minds of thinking people today as Pasteur's germ theory, say, or Darwin's theory of evolution, or Malthus's dread of overpopulation.

Hint number two: Breeding will tell. This incredi precocious writer's mother was a famous writer, too. Some of her books were illustrated by none other than William Blake! Imagine having one's book
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trated by William Blake! Her most passionate subject: the right of women to be treated as the equals of My mystery dead person's father was a writer, too, an

preacher who wrote, most memorably, "God himself has no right to be a tyrant." Who were the friends of such distinguished parents? William Blake and Thomas Paine, and William Wordsworth to name a few.

Hint number

This person was married to a

celebrity, as famous for the romantic disorder of his life as for his poetry. He inspired the suicide of his first wife, for example. As Romantically as you please, he drowned when he was only thirty.

Give up? I spoke in Heaven today to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author, again before she was twenty, of the most prescient and influential science fiction novel of all times:
Frankenstein: Or the Modern
Prometheus.

was in

a full century before the

end of the First World

its Frankensteinian

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