What Light Was

De: Shawn Callaway Hays, Stephen Callaway Hays

Narrado por: James D Sasser

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.

©2025 Shawn Hays and Stephen Hays (P)2025 Shawn Hays and Stephen Hays

But What Is Light?

This question is asked at important junctures in this dynamic, engaging, enthralling novel—with each of its major characters sure of the light (The Great Dream) in their entertaining and lasting works, but so fleeting in their historical lives. Brilliant. The performance is outstanding and professional, bringing the soul out of these living dialogues, letters, and scenarios that bring Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby, and fragments of other great works by the Romantics and the Fitzgeralds. Simultaneously devastating and hopeful. A truly necessary listen.