Part 1 of 2. Mary fears she’s losing the two people she most admires—her lover and her father—after she’s lost her reputation. She regains them with the publication of Frankenstein. As Scott is crafting his biography of the Shelleys and Godwins a century later, he fears that he’s losing his audience and his wife. He regains them with the publication of his other “work” he’s authoring at the same—The Great Gatsby. As eternal celebrities of Western culture—the Shelleys, the Godwins, and the Fitzgeralds—their brief victories are dramatically retold in What Light Was as dialogues, verse, and meditations. In similar struggles a century after Scott’s “Great American Novel”—as the ambitions of Romanticism are put on trial in these living love letters—we will find that it is not easy being the children of these dreamers and their illusory masterpieces.