The Carnival of the Animals and xylophone. From the beginning, Saint-Saëns regarded the work as a piece of fun. On 9 February 1886 he wrote to his publishers Durand in Paris that he was composing a work for the coming Shrove Tuesday, and confessing that he knew he should be working on his Third Symphony, but that this work was "such fun" (). He had apparently intended to write the work for his students at the École Niedermeyer, but it was first performed at a private concert given by the cellist Charles Lebouc on Shrove Tuesday, 9 March 1886. A second (private) performance was given
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