Transformations

Abstract

In the frame narrative of Mary Shelley's story "The Invisible Girl" (1832) a remarkable thing happens. The narrator describes a picture – one which the story's readers can immediately compare with its own description, since this picture is (almost) identical with the engraving which accompanies the story and which was, at its first publication in an annual, The Keepsake, placed on the opposite page. What is remarkable in the narrator's account of the picture is his sudden self-consciousness: