Save this story Save Story Save this story Popular culture would have you believe that Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 novel, is a horror story of male hubris, about a mad scientist contending with the dangers of his own creation. And it is, at least in part. But within Shelley’s critique of patriarchal power, there is another voice that is often overlooked: her own. About a third of the way into the book, the narration switches to the perspective of the so-called monster as he tells Victor Frankenstein what has happened to him during the nearly two years he and his creator have been apart.
The six chapters written in the creature’s voice contain some of the most achingly beautiful prose in the whole novel. He details how he learned to understand language and emotion. How he marveled at the warmth of the sun, the blooming of flowers, the sweetness of fruit. How he grew to love the family he tenderly observed from his hiding place, and how devastating their rejection was. He explains how he came to know anger, loneliness, loss, rage—and the vengeful acts they inspired.
“Reading those chapters, I find it really hard to think of this as a man’s voice,” the British-born, New York–based conceptual artist Jane Benson tells me during a recent visit to her Chelsea studio. “This sounds like a woman’s voice crying for justice, and to be heard. It’s bathed in feelings of isolation and grief and desertion and betrayal—all things that in everyday life, that was the woman’s lot.” She came to think of the creature’s voice as not only Mary Shelley’s, but also a general evocation of the struggles women face in a misogynistic world.
Jane Benson, the day, 2026, graphite on archival polyester film, radiant acrylic, acrylic paint. Photo: Steven Probert. Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters Benson is not the first to find feminist undertones in Shelley’s Gothic classic—scholars like Barbara Johnson, Ellen Moers , and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have written about themes of motherhood and female authorship that they found embedded within Frankenstein. (When Shelley first published the book, anonymously, many readers assumed it was written by her husband, Percy Shelley.) But as an artist, Benson wondered how she might visually represent this idea of the monster’s voice as a woman’s. What would that look like? What would it sound like?
She tracked down a limited-edition facsimile of Shelley’s original Frankenstein manuscript, released to mark the book’s 200th anniversary, and began her delightfully obsessive deep dive into the text. The resulting artworks make up “her her,” Benson’s new gallery exhibition that opens at Sargent’s Daughters in Tribeca on October 30. (More of the series will go on view at Art Basel Miami in December.) The show contains more than two dozen works, mostly text-based drawings that use the author’s own handwriting as their main material—a decision that allows the focus to stay on the devastating phrases an 18-year-old Shelley used to illustrate the creature’s tragic arc.
“I haven’t altered anything,” Benson says of the drawings. “These are just blow-ups of her pages.… These sentences, that’s exactly how they appear on the page.”
Jane Benson, A Woman's Score (Chapter 7), 2026, graphite on archival polyester film, radiant iridescent acrylic, acrylic paint. Photo: Steven Probert. Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters But these are not mere re-creations of the manuscript. Instead, Benson has come up with myriad ways of excavating the text, something that has become a signature in her politically engaged art practice over the past three decades. (Benson, who is dyslexic, finds that this process gives her a way into a text that focuses not so much on the linear process of reading as on the ideas the text contains.) Some works in “her her” are as tall as six feet, and many of them are layered on iridescent yellow film with reflective borders. They seem to vibrate off the wall, as if Mary Shelley herself were knocking around the frame, begging us to listen.
Take the piece her her (2026), which lends its name to the exhibition and features a tight zoom on those two crossed-out words. In highlighting such an instance within the manuscript, Benson “aims to reiterate and emphasize the negation of women throughout history.”
For her “solfège” pieces, Benson has excised all words but the seven syllables of solfège ( do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti ), with the resulting score performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, a frequent collaborator of Benson’s. (In a bit of cheeky fun, the recordings will be played on a loop throughout the gallery.) As she cut out all the non-solfège words and letters, Benson found herself surrounded by “a sea of sentences.” Out of these cast-offs, she made little lyric poems befitting her themes. Like this one, missing its initial do : ubtless, / on I wept, without / my limbs / I sat.
And for the visually striking “counter works,” as she calls them, Benson filled in the enclosed space of letters like g and d and o (called “counters” in typography) to create a rhythmic pattern of ovals and dots—a kind of literary animal print. In most of the sentences, only the letters’ filled-in counter space remains, with the rest erased. But some choice Shelley sentences— I waited with forced patience until the moon had sunk, for one example—are left intact. “Those are the ones that drove me to being so struck by this being a woman’s voice,” Benson explains.
There are even more Easter eggs—like the varying shades of yellow, which come from tone notes that match up to the solfège scores—but at a certain point this body of work becomes less about how she’s doing it and more about the dedication to the idea. “I was just compelled to keep going and make the work so that these words can be seen.”
Jane Benson, ought sun or gentle breeze (detail), 2026, Graphite on archival polyester film, radiant iridescent acrylic, acrylic paint. Photo: Steven Probert. Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters Benson first read Frankenstein alongside other classics at school (she was born in Thornbury, a town in Gloucestershire, in 1973, and grew up in the tiny village of Gawsworth in northwest England) . Like many people who first encountered the book at a young age, and like countless others who have seen its various adaptations for the screen, she was swept up in the flattened narrative of a violent creature and the regrets of its maker. “You have the sort of similar arguments, like, Who’s the monster? ” she says.
Then, a few years ago—before Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and looser interpretations like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! dragged the story back into the zeitgeist, and after she became a mother—Benson reread the book, and those 40 or so pages from the creature’s perspective triggered a whole new set of subversive ideas for her. “Is a monster the person in society that nobody understands, and that’s why we’re afraid of it?” she wondered. “I’m like, That’s a woman. No one understood Mary Shelley; people were afraid of her.”
Mary Shelley, painted in 1831 by Samuel John Stump. Photo: Heritage Images/Getty Images Frankenstein is often overshadowed by the lore of its author (the daughter of two famed English intellectuals, women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin); her relationships to men (at 16 she ran away to France with the poet Percy Shelley, a pupil of her father’s who was already married); and the fantastical circumstances under which she wrote the book (holed up during the stormy summer of 1816 in a Swiss villa rented by Lord Byron, who one night challenged Mary, Percy, Mary’s stepsister, and his personal physician to a ghost-story contest).
But perhaps more consequential to the writing of Frankenstein was the grief that Mary Shelley carried. “It’s hard to separate any of it from what she was going through at that time,” Benson says. Shelley never knew her mother, who died 11 days after Shelley was born. Seventeen years later, Shelley lost her first baby at less than two weeks old. She wrote in her diary, “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.” She began writing Frankenstein the following year. (Shelley would lose two more young children, including the baby she nursed while writing Frankenstein , all before her 22nd birthday. Only her fourth child, Percy Florence Shelley, born in 1819, would live to adulthood.)
Jane Benson, Elm III, 2026, graphite and ink transfer on archival Fabriano paper, hand-painted acrylic on mat board & radiant iridescent acrylic. Photo: Steven Probert. Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters At Sargent’s Daughters, three tender graphite drawings of elm trees hang on the back gallery wall. Benson made them as an homage to both Shelley’s grief and her own, over the recent passing of her father. The margins of Shelley’s manuscript were full of doodles of what look like English elms, which covered the lush landscape in the part of England where Benson was raised. Benson loved these trees, and was devastated when many were lost to Dutch elm disease. “My first heartbreak,” she says. Her father photographed them back in the 1970s, and after his death Benson looked everywhere for the photos, to no avail.
Seeing them there in Shelley’s manuscript felt like this personal connection between author and artist, a reassuring echo across time and space. Keep going, the trees seem to say. Keep looking.
“Jane Benson: her her” is on view at Sargent’s Daughters in New York City from October 30 to December 5, 2026.
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Source: Lifestyle
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