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 |  Posted: 04/16/12 09:28 AM ET  |  Updated: 04/16/12 09:28 AM ET

Just Friends: Famous Author Duos Who Kept It Clean

By Nathan Rostron for Bookish:

From “When Harry Met Sally” to “Friends with Kids,” we’ve been told that men and women can be friends at first—but then it gets complicated. Are our XY friendships doomed to fracture us into lovers, exes, enemies or strangers? Writers tell us otherwise. Here are some famous literary friendships between the sexes that stayed (pretty) platonic.

The Monsters: Mary Shelley & Lord Byron
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"The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein," by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler

"Frankenstein" was brought to life--so the story goes--on a dark night in 1816 in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva when Lord Byron--famously described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know"--challenged his friends Percy Shelley and his soon-to-be-wife Mary, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont and John William Polidori each to tell a ghost story.,There has been much speculation about the famous lothario Byron's influence on Mary Shelley in "Frankenstein" and other works (where he sometimes appears as a fictionalized hero)--and whether those touches were merely stylistic. Claire Clairmont had love affairs with both Percy Shelley and Byron but would later call them "monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery." The story of what really went on during that summer and beyond is unraveled in "The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein," by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler.
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By Nathan Rostron for Bookish: From “When Harry Met Sally” to “Friends with Kids,” we’ve been told that men and women can be friends at first—but then it gets complicated. Are our XY fr...
By Nathan Rostron for Bookish: From “When Harry Met Sally” to “Friends with Kids,” we’ve been told that men and women can be friends at first—but then it gets complicated. Are our XY fr...
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