The Carnival of the Animals on 2 April at the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo "The Swan", which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of 'Frankenstein' ... and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist." Paglia compared Lauritsen's work to that of the critic Leslie Fiedler, concluding that, "This is a funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear." The feminist Germaine Greer dismissed Lauritsen's thesis in "The Guardian", writing