# data[].attributes.body
https://sailor-rurouni.home.blog/2018/11/26/historicwomendaily-notable-women-writers-lady/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley's novel?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus" when she was eighteen years old, two years after she'd become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. "Nurse the baby, read," she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: "I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it," and then, in the morning, "Find my baby dead." With grief at that loss came a fear of "a fever from the milk." Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. "Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived," she wrote in her diary. "Awake and find no baby."

Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing "Frankenstein," and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn't put her name on her book-she published "Frankenstein" anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children-and she didn't give her monster a name, either. "This anonymous androdaemon," one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of "Frankenstein," staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as "------."

"This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good," Shelley remarked about the creature's theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother's milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck- Awoke and found no mother.

"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils," Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out his tale. The rain patters on the windowpane; a bleak light flickers from a dying candle. He looks at the "lifeless thing" at his feet, come to life: "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs." Having labored so long to bring the creature to life, he finds himself disgusted and horrified-"unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created"-and flees, abandoning his creation, unnamed. "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion," the creature says, before, in the book's final scene, he disappears on a raft of ice.

"Frankenstein" is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel, and an autobiography, a chaos of literary fertility that left its very young author at pains to explain her "hideous progeny." In the introduction she wrote for a revised edition in 1831, she took up the humiliating question "How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea" and made up a story in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting that the story had come to her in a dream ("I saw-with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,-I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together") and that writing it consisted of "making only a transcript" of that dream. A century later, when a lurching, grunting Boris Karloff played the creature in Universal Pictures's brilliant 1931 production of "Frankenstein," directed by James Whale, the monster-prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel-was no longer merely nameless but all but speechless, too, as if what Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, an agony unutterable.

Every book is a baby, born, but "Frankenstein" is often supposed to have been more assembled than written, an unnatural birth, as though all that the author had done were to piece together the writings of others, especially those of her father and her husband. "If Godwin's daughter could not help philosophising," one mid-twentieth-century critic wrote, "Shelley's wife knew also the eerie charms of the morbid, the occult, the scientifically bizarre." This enduring condescension, the idea of the author as a vessel for the ideas of other people-a fiction in which the author participated, so as to avoid the scandal of her own brain-goes some way to explaining why "Frankenstein" has accreted so many wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two centuries since its publication. For its bicentennial, the original, 1818 edition has been reissued, as a trim little paperback (Penguin Classics), with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon, and as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake, "The New Annotated Frankenstein" (Liveright), edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. Universal is developing a new "Bride of Frankenstein" as part of a series of remakes from its backlist of horror movies. Filmography recapitulating politico-chicanery, the age of the superhero is about to yield to the age of the monster. But what about the baby?

"Frankenstein," the story of a creature who has no name, has for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything. Most lately, it has been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that derives less from the 1818 novel than from later stage and film versions, especially the 1931 film, and that took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, M.I.T. Press has just published an edition of the original text "annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds," and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, at Arizona State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation; they offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences. "Remorse extinguished every hope," Victor says, in Volume II, Chapter 1, by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone Victor loves. "I had been the author of unalterable evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness." The M.I.T. edition appends, here, a footnote: "The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer's sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb. . . . Scientists' responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed."

This is a way to make use of the novel, but it involves stripping out nearly all the sex and birth, everything female-material first mined by Muriel Spark, in a biography of Shelley published in 1951, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of her death. Spark, working closely with Shelley's diaries and paying careful attention to the author's eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss, argued that "Frankenstein" was no minor piece of genre fiction but a literary work of striking originality. In the nineteen-seventies, that interpretation was taken up by feminist literary critics who wrote about "Frankenstein" as establishing the origins of science fiction by way of the "female gothic." What made Mary Shelley's work so original, Ellen Moers argued at the time, was that she was a writer who was a mother. Tolstoy had thirteen children, born at home, Moers pointed out, but the major female eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, the Austens and Dickinsons, tended to be "spinsters and virgins." Shelley was an exception.

So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman Shelley knew not as a mother but as a writer who wrote about, among other things, how to raise a baby. "I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring," Wollstonecraft wrote in "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters," in 1787, ten years before giving birth to the author of "Frankenstein." As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography "Romantic Outlaws," Wollstonecraft first met her fellow political radical William Godwin in 1791, at a London dinner party hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man." Wollstonecraft and Godwin were "mutually displeased with each other," Godwin later wrote; they were the smartest people in the room, and they couldn't help arguing all evening. Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" appeared in 1792, and, the next year, Godwin published "Political Justice." In 1793, during an affair with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft became pregnant. ("I am nourishing a creature," she wrote Imlay.) Not long after Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Fanny, Imlay abandoned her. She and Godwin became lovers in 1796, and when she became pregnant they married, for the sake of the baby, even though neither of them believed in marriage. In 1797, Wollstonecraft died of an infection contracted from the fingers of a physician who reached into her uterus to remove the afterbirth. Godwin's daughter bore the name of his dead wife, as if she could be brought back to life, another afterbirth.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was fifteen years old when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1812. He was twenty, and married, with a pregnant wife. Having been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism and disowned by his father, Shelley had sought out William Godwin, his intellectual hero, as a surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin fille spent their illicit courtship, as much Romanticism as romance, passionately reading the works of her parents while reclining on Wollstonecraft's grave, in the St. Pancras churchyard. "Go to the tomb and read," she wrote in her diary. "Go with Shelley to the churchyard." Plainly, they were doing more than reading, because she was pregnant when she ran away with him, fleeing her father's house in the half-light of night, along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who wanted to be ruined, too.

If any man served as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord Byron, who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and abandoned his children. He was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," as one of his lovers pronounced, mainly because of his many affairs, which likely included sleeping with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron married in January, 1815, and a daughter, Ada, was born in December. But, when his wife left him, a year into their marriage, Byron was forced never to see his wife or daughter again, lest his wife reveal the scandal of his affair with Leigh. (Ada was about the age Mary Godwin's first baby would have been, had she lived. Ada's mother, fearing that the girl might grow up to become a poet, as mad and bad as her father, raised her, instead, to be a mathematician. Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein, would in 1843 provide an influential theoretical description of a general-purpose computer, a century before one was built.)

In the spring of 1816, Byron, fleeing scandal, left England for Geneva, and it was there that he met up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont. Moralizers called them the League of Incest. By summer, Clairmont was pregnant by Byron. Byron was bored. One evening, he announced, "We will each write a ghost story." Godwin began the story that would become "Frankenstein." Byron later wrote, "Methinks it is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen- not nineteen, indeed, at that time."

During the months when Godwin was turning her ghost story into a novel, and nourishing yet another creature in her belly, Shelley's wife, pregnant now with what would have been their third child, killed herself; Clairmont gave birth to a girl-Byron's, though most people assumed it was Shelley's-and Shelley and Godwin got married. For a time, they attempted to adopt the girl, though Byron later took her, having noticed that nearly all of Godwin and Shelley's children had died. "I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children's treatment in their family-that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital," he wrote, cruelly, about the Shelleys. "Have they reared one?" (Byron, by no means interested in rearing a child himself, placed the girl in a convent, where she died at the age of five.)

When "Frankenstein," begun in the summer of 1816, was published eighteen months later, it bore an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The book became an immediate sensation. "It seems to be universally known and read," a friend wrote to Percy Shelley. Sir Walter Scott wrote, in an early review, "The author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination." Scott, like many readers, assumed that the author was Percy Shelley. Reviewers less enamored of the Romantic poet damned the book's Godwinian radicalism and its Byronic impieties. John Croker, a conservative member of Parliament, called "Frankenstein" a "tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity"-radical, unhinged, and immoral.

But the politics of "Frankenstein" are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

The novel's structure meant that those opposed to political radicalism often found themselves baffled and bewildered by "Frankenstein," as literary critics such as Chris Baldick and Adriana Craciun have pointed out. The novel appears to be heretical and revolutionary; it also appears to be counter-revolutionary. It depends on which doll is doing the talking.

If "Frankenstein" is a referendum on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it, Victor Frankenstein's politics align nicely with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as "a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it." The creature's own politics, though, align not with Burke's but with those of two of Burke's keenest adversaries, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men's bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or a king over his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when he described feudalism as a "ferocious monster." ("How dare you sport thus with life?" the creature asks his maker.) The creature, born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he has become a villain, in just the way that Wollstonecraft predicted. "People are rendered ferocious by misery," she wrote, "and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent." ("Make me happy," the creature begs Frankenstein, to no avail.)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley took pains that readers' sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein, whose suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature, whose suffering is worse. The art of the book lies in the way Shelley nudges readers' sympathy, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, even line by line, from Frankenstein to the creature, even when it comes to the creature's vicious murders, first of Frankenstein's little brother, then of his best friend, and, finally, of his bride. Much evidence suggests that she succeeded. "The justice is indisputably on his side," one critic wrote in 1824, "and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree."

"Hear my tale," the creature insists, when he at last confronts his creator. What follows is the autobiography of an infant. He awoke, and all was confusion. "I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing." He was cold and naked and hungry and bereft of company, and yet, having no language, was unable even to name these sensations. "But, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept." He learned to walk, and began to wander, still unable to speak-"the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again." Eventually, he found shelter in a lean-to adjacent to a cottage alongside a wood, where, observing the cottagers talk, he learned of the existence of language: "I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse: I learned and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood." Watching the cottagers read a book, "Ruins of Empires," by the eighteenth-century French revolutionary the Comte de Volney, he both learned how to read and acquired "a cursory knowledge of history"-a litany of injustice. "I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood." He learned that the weak are everywhere abused by the powerful, and the poor despised.

Shelley kept careful records of the books she read and translated, naming title after title and compiling a list each year-Milton, Goethe, Rousseau, Ovid, Spenser, Coleridge, Gibbon, and hundreds more, from history to chemistry. "Babe is not well," she noted in her diary while writing "Frankenstein." "Write, draw and walk; read Locke." Or, "Walk; write; read the 'Rights of Women.' " The creature keeps track of his reading, too, and, unsurprisingly, he reads the books that Shelley read and reread most often. One day, wandering in the woods, he stumbles upon a leather trunk, lying on the ground, that contains three books: Milton's "Paradise Lost," Plutarch's "Lives," and Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"-the library that, along with Volney's "Ruins," determines his political philosophy, as reviewers readily understood. "His code of ethics is formed on this extraordinary stock of poetical theology, pagan biography, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical jacobinism," according to the review of "Frankenstein" most widely read in the United States, "yet, in spite of all his enormities, we think the monster, a very pitiable and ill-used monster."

Sir Walter Scott found this the most preposterous part of "Frankenstein": "That he should have not only learned to speak, but to read, and, for aught we know, to write-that he should have become acquainted with Werter, with Plutarch's Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall, seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry." But the creature's account of his education very closely follows the conventions of a genre of writing far distant from Scott's own: the slave narrative.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery the year "Frankenstein" was published, was following those same conventions when, in his autobiography, he described learning to read by trading with white boys for lessons. Douglass realized his political condition at the age of twelve, while reading the "Dialogue Between a Master and Slave," reprinted in "The Columbian Orator" (a book for which he paid fifty cents, and which was one of the only things he brought with him when he escaped from slavery). It was his coming of age. "The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers," Douglass wrote, in a line that the creature himself might have written.

Likewise, the creature comes of age when he finds Frankenstein's notebook, recounting his experiment, and learns how he was created, and with what injustice he has been treated. It's at this moment that the creature's tale is transformed from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of a slave. "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing," Douglass wrote. "It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy." So, too, the creature: "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was." Douglass: "I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead." The creature: "Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?" Douglass seeks his escape; the creature seeks his revenge.

Among the many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley's novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for creating the monster-usurping the power of God, and of women-or for failing to love, care for, and educate him. The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. Much of "Frankenstein" participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns is not the one in France but the one in Haiti. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian revolution, along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty and equality than the revolution in France had, since they involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in 1807, the debate over slavery in Britain's territories continued through the decision in favor of emancipation, in 1833. Both Shelleys closely followed this debate, and in the years before and during the composition of "Frankenstein" they together read several books about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood. He asked, "Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?"

Given Mary Shelley's reading of books that stressed the physical distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the creature is explicitly racial, figuring him as African, as opposed to European. "I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet," the creature says. "I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs." This characterization became, onstage, a caricature. Beginning with the 1823 stage production of "Frankenstein," the actor playing "------ " wore blue face paint, a color that identified him less as dead than as colored. It was this production that George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons, invoked in 1824, during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Tellingly, Canning's remarks brought together the novel's depiction of the creature as a baby and the culture's figuring of Africans as children. "In dealing with the negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child," Canning told Parliament. "To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance." In later nineteenth-century stage productions, the creature was explicitly dressed as an African. Even the 1931 James Whale film, in which Karloff wore green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as black: he is, in the film's climactic scene, lynched.

Because the creature reads as a slave, "Frankenstein" holds a unique place in American culture, as the literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued, a few years ago, in "Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor." "What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead," the black abolitionist David Walker asked from Boston in 1829, in his "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," anticipating Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" by a century and a half. "Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people," Frederick Douglass declared in New York, on the eve of the American Civil War. Nat Turner was called a monster; so was John Brown. By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein's monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did, most of them when she was still very young. Her half sister, Fanny Imlay, took her own life in 1816. Percy Shelley drowned in 1822. Lord Byron fell ill and died in Greece in 1824, leaving Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."

She chose that as the theme behind the novel she wrote eight years after "Frankenstein." Published in 1826, when the author was twenty-eight, "The Last Man" is set in the twenty-first century, when only one man endures, the lone survivor of a terrible plague, having failed-for all his imagination, for all his knowledge-to save the life of a single person. Nurse the baby, read. Find my baby dead. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Strange and Twisted Life of "Frankenstein"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From 2018, Jill Lepore on why Mary Shelley's novel has accreted so many wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two centuries since its publication.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
became fascinated by Mary Shelley and her most famous novel because of her husband. Back in 2011, I found myself trying to make sense of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry. It was a tricky assignment. Percy was above all a creature of his own cultural moment, and nothing dates like a zeitgeist. Yet Mary's Frankenstein comes out of just the same heady cultural and political nexus as her husband's verse, and her novel has continued to fascinate us. Two hundred years after its publication in January 1818, it still speaks to us directly as a myth about contemporary life. It has inspired film adaptations across genres, from the comedy caper Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to the quasi-rock opera The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner. Then there's the apparently endless schlock and kitsch in comics and cosplay (where fans dress up as their favourite fictional characters). It has become the go-to journalistic shorthand for technological interventions in human biology or medical science: Dr Frankenstein and his creature make their way in the mainstream of modern life. They reappear in our fantasies and nightmares more consistently than most fictional or historical characters. Now we can expect a slew of new Frankensteins, as everyone's favourite scar-faced shuffling giant and his creator are remade for a new time.

How did Shelley create her great work? Some critics have claimed that she didn't

Mary has been much researched, all too often in terms of whether she was good or bad for Percy. But she hadn't been placed at the centre of her own story since Miranda Seymour's magisterial biography in 2000. I wanted to discover a Mary Shelley for our times: to find the girl behind the book, and to reconstruct what writing it must have been like. Her story is every bit as archetypal as that of Mary's two most famous characters - her life and relationships with men couldn't be more relevant for our #MeToo era. Mary was just 18 when she had the idea for Frankenstein; 19 when she finished writing the book. How could a teenager come up with not one but two enduring archetypes: the scientist obsessed by blue-sky research and unable to see it has ethical and social consequences, and the near human he creates?

It's an astonishing achievement, and even more so when we remember that, being a girl, Mary wasn't educated in the same way as many of her Romantic writing peers. Unlike Percy, she had no Eton nor Oxford, but had lessons in the home schoolroom and a grim six months at Miss Pettman's Ladies' School in Ramsgate, and learned from browsing the books in her father's library. Her parents were two of the most notorious radicals of her day: her mother, who died of complications 11 days after her birth, was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; her father was the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin. He may have been a proponent of anarchism but he upheld many contemporary conventions at home. Once Mary eloped with Percy at the age of 16, for example, the former apostle of free love cut off his daughter until she was respectably married.

So how on earth did Mary create her precocious masterpiece? One answer given by readers and critics down the years is that she didn't. On its first, anonymous appearance reviewers surmised that this novel of ideas was written by someone close to Godwin, but not that the author might be his daughter. Percy, as son-in-law, was credited instead. Even in recent years Percy's corrections, visible in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realised that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today.

A second sceptical response to Mary's astonishing achievement disparages her more slyly, suggesting that the archetypes of Frankenstein and his creature aren't in fact original. Such sceptics cite the classical myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who creates a lover for himself, or the half-human figure of Caliban in The Tempest. Both were part of the early 19th-century cultural canon and, growing up in a literary household, Mary will have been aware of them.

But her own creations differ from both, and it's these different qualities that speak so vividly to us today. Pygmalion, at least in Ovid's Metamorphoses, doesn't set out to create a human, he simply falls in love with one of his own creations. The goddess Aphrodite is so touched by this that she brings the sculpture to life for him. George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion retells this parable about artistic vanity. His story about Henry Higgins, the linguist who makes a young lady out of a street flower-seller but does so for his own benefit not hers, remains familiar today in Lerner and Loewe's version, the musical My Fair Lady.

A statue also turns into a woman in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, when the figure of King Leontes' much-mourned wife comes to life. Every 16th-century grammar school boy got a smattering of classical education; the young Shakespeare is likely to have encountered the Pygmalion myth in his Stratford-upon-Avon classroom. Thus The Tempest echoes another classical myth in which the Minotaur, like fellow island-dweller Caliban, is the hideous offspring of a human mother and a supernatural father and lords it over his island until subdued by an arriving hero.

Clearly, neither is a precursor for Mary's ambitious young doctor who wants to create the perfect human, but fails to do so. In fact, Frankenstein is one of the great novels of failure, taking its place somewhere between Cervantes's rambling 17th-century masterpiece, Don Quixote (which Mary read while she was working on her novel) and Hemingway's 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea. In both these books, though, failure is viewed with compassion, in the context of human dignity and ideals. Frankenstein, on the other hand, portrays it as the destructive result of overreaching. Mary's portrait of failure as the dark heart of hubris is couched in terms so strong they seem almost religious. Sure enough, this idealistic young daughter of a former dissenting minister believed that right and wrong were a matter of fact, not just opinion.

Yet Frankenstein 's passionate appeal for justice is moving, not sermonising. Mary never had the chance to be a prig. Even as she was writing what became her first novel, years of the harsh censure of a woman's private life that today would be referred to as "slut-shaming" had begun. She had been ostracised by family and friends for running off with Percy, a married man, and was subjected to sniggering speculation by male acquaintances. The couple married after Percy's first wife, Harriet, took her own life, but were regarded as so disreputable that, in an unprecedented decision, they were refused custody of Percy's children from his first marriage. In future years, Mary would sit through a sermon preached against her, find her husband viewed as fair game by other women, and her in-laws would campaign to take away her surviving child.

Even so, sincere and engaging as it may be, her moral stance is not what makes Frankenstein feel so contemporary. Nor does its early 19th-century technology. Mary imagined first a combination of maths and alchemy - and then electricity in her revised 1832 edition - animating her patchwork corpse. Neither really resonates in today's age of biochemical breakthroughs and genetic engineering. The laboratory electrocution scene first imagined in James Whale's classic 1931 film of Frankenstein now seems fabulously kitsch.

But in the novel, myth powers technology and not the other way around. Frankenstein shows us that aspiration and progress are indistinguishable from hubris - until something goes wrong, when suddenly we see all too clearly what was reasonable endeavour and what overreaching. By the time she wrote her classic, Mary was aware that the man she had married was an emotional and philosophical overreacher. For all his family wealth, Percy was often in debt. And his timing was staggeringly poor: even during her first pregnancy he had pressured 17-year-old Mary to sleep with his best friend in pursuit of free love, while his own long-running romantic involvement with Mary's stepsister had started at the time of the couple's elopement. Moreover, for a soi-disant writer, remarkably little of his work had been published; Mary spent a lot of time fair copying it to send to publishers.

But Frankenstein is no memoir. The question it asks, "How far is too far?", is at the very heart of modernity. The Romantics, Mary among them, "leaned in" to progress. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm called the period from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of the first world war "the long 19th century". Published early in this classical era of modernity, Mary's novel still helps us define its terms today. Shorthand for the way we experience ourselves within a world of increasing man-made complexity, "modernity" is both positive and negative, signalling hope for progress as well as our fear of change. Frankenstein identifies the mismatch between human experience and what we are expected to become as technology and science advance.

As well as being emotionally expressive, Frankenstein was informed by contemporary intellectual debate. In 1816, when Mary started writing it, the study of natural phenomena wasn't yet a proper profession; the term "scientist" had yet to be invented. Amateur speculation could be cutting-edge. Those who were professional gave fashionable public lectures, which encouraged more amateur participation. When Mary was in her teens, these lecturers included her father's friend, the chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy; the Italian physicist and philosopher Dr Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini, each of whom gave demonstrations of how to pass an electric current through the nerves of a dead body.

Her times seem so right for Mary's novel that I was briefly tempted by a third response to the puzzle of how Frankenstein came into being: a very young woman simply, rather artlessly, channelled whatever was going on in her social and cultural milieu into her book. Of course this reduces cultural history to the folk wisdom that "everyone's got a book in them", and ignores the labour and technique entailed in producing a work that is publishable - not to mention a great one. Yet it's fascinating how frequently female writers do incur this reaction. Think of the widespread reception of that towering 20th-century writer Sylvia Plath - no less a transformative poet than her husband Ted Hughes - as simply expressing her feelings. Indeed, think today of the US poet Sharon Olds, forced for years to equivocate over whether material in her Pulitzer prize-winning work is autobiographical lest she be similarly dismissed. The question is not how did Mary write Frankenstein, but why is it so hard to believe that she did? After all, she herself left a portrait of the kind of thinking she enjoyed: the leaping, near-intuitive intellect she gives her Dr Frankenstein. Just the sort of "aha!" that can suddenly, and brilliantly, synthesise a number of apparently unrelated ideas, exactly as Mary's story does.

Everything we know about her writing process - and we know a lot, thanks to her journal and letters - tells us it was consciously literary, painstakingly crafted. Even its famous trigger was literary. After they had spent an evening in June 1816 reading ghost stories together, Lord Byron set a group of his guests at Villa Diodati, on the banks of Lake Geneva, a writing competition. As Mary recalled: "'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron ... I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task." Meanwhile the men in the room - Percy, and either Byron or Byron's doctor John William Polidori - were having a serious talk about "the principles of life". It seems to have occurred to no one that Mary, having already given birth twice and lost her first child at 12 days old, probably knew more about such "principles" than anyone else present.

But everything the teenage mother didn't feel entitled to mention in Byron's salon fuels her novel. Mary completed much of Frankenstein while living in Bath, at a time when Percy was often absent. It was a tempestuous year in which both her half-sister Fanny and Harriet Shelley killed themselves, her stepsister's daughter with Byron was born, Mary got married and was pregnant for the third time. It's no surprise the novel is so full of human insight and understanding: maternal anxieties about creating a perfect human; fears of ugliness, lovelessness and rejection; an analysis of what it is to be unmothered and alone in the world.

Shelley's monster embodies her fears about giving birth to the perfect human

These are universal themes and, by August 1818, the book "seems to be universally read", as their writer friend Thomas Love Peacock reported to Mary and Percy. But Mary wasn't basking in this success. She had already followed Percy into political exile in Europe, and within a year she would suffer the deaths of both her children. Dragged from pillar to post by the charismatic, unreliable man to whom she was committed, even while he became increasingly unfaithful to her, she would, until Percy's death in 1822, resemble nothing so much as a "surrendered wife".

It's impossible to tell the story of her life without at every turn being aware of the fact that Mary was a female writer. Widowed just before turning 25, she discovered that most friends would have nothing to do with someone they saw as a cross between a mere poet's mistress and the killjoy who cramped his style. She returned to London and spent the next two decades eking out an allowance for her surviving child that her father-in-law loaned her. Sir Timothy Shelley's own eldest child was illegitimate, but he never accepted Mary - who had lived and had two children with Percy before she married him - into the Shelley family.

Still, a dogged survivor and a consummate professional, Mary supported herself, and saw her son through Harrow and Oxford, by her writing, the great bulk of which had to be done anonymously. The archives are full of her unsuccessful attempts to pitch to publishers. It's hard to imagine a male author who had experienced similar popular and critical success being so consistently knocked back. But Mary had the bad luck not to have started her writing life under a masculine pseudonym. Notorious in literary circles because of her relationship with Percy, she never enjoyed the freedoms of her slightly younger contemporaries, the Brontës and George Eliot. After Frankenstein, she was not read purely as a writer, but always judged as a woman.

In a revealing journal entry from 21 October 1838, when she was 41, Mary tried to reconcile the feeling that "To be something great and good was the precept given me" with her failure to write radical philosophy in "the good cause". "My total friendlessness, my horror of pushing, and inability to put myself forward unless led, cherished and supported, all this has sunk me." Forced to feel inferior by the double standards stacked against her, yet ashamed of her failure to achieve all a man could without those handicaps: Mary feels absolutely contemporary. We find her today in debates about the Women's prize for fiction, in magazine articles comparing the fortunes of male and female writers, in the horrors of the casting couch.

Frankenstein shows us how failure and hubris are two sides of the same coin. Mary's life reveals the tremendous hubris it took for this teenaged girl to give birth to two of the most enduring and influential myths of our time.

Published on 18 January, Fiona Sampson's In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Profile, £18.99) is a Guardian Bookshop One to Watch. To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. It is also serialised on Radio 4's Book of the Week from 15-19 January.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frankenstein at 200 - why hasn't Mary Shelley been given the respect she deserves?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shelley's Frankenstein has spoken to technological and cultural anxieties from the Enlightenment to #MeToo. But its author's achievements have too often been dismissed or treated with scepticism

# data[].attributes.body
Bellman & Black: A Ghost Story
Diane Setterfield
Set in 19th-century England, this leisurely paced gothic novel oozes with a sense of menace. As a boy, William Bell kills a rook for fun. All seems well, until -- at the height of his happiness -- tragedy strikes, gradually robbing him of all he loves. Mr. Black appears, ready to strike a bargain with the desperate Bell, but the cost will be high indeed. British novelist Diane Setterfield knows, and draws inspiration from, traditional gothic novels like Shelley’s. Her eerily suspenseful plot gives away no secrets before their time.

Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmad Sa'dawi

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi -- a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café --collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.

Perdido Street Station
China Mieville

In a bleak, post-industrial future city called New Crobuzon, a scientist's drive to study flying things leads to the release of a strange grub that threatens to destroy the city. When his lover disappears, Isaac, the scientist, finds himself pursued not only by the monster he released, but by a variety of factions. The sprawling fantasy setting gives this novel a distinctly Victorian feel, and its themes will resonate with Frankenstein fans.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Peter Ackroyd

When budding scientist Victor Frankenstein meets radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford, the two become fast friends, united by their interest in the origins of life. With Percy's encouragement, Victor begins his research into electricity -- which in turn leads to the creation of his legendary monster. This inventive reinterpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in the language of the early 19th century, incorporates both historical figures (such as Mary Shelley and Lord Byron) and fictional characters.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson's mad scientist turns his investigations on himself, seeking to separate his virtues from his vices. Dr. Jekyll, a respected young physician, hopes to protect his reputation by slipping out to enjoy his less acceptable pleasures in another guise. The result is Mr. Hyde, a being of brutal, uncontrolled cruelty who soon escapes his creator's control (sound familiar?).

Source: NoveList Book Discussion Guide

# data[].attributes.headline
                                    Main Themes

# data[].attributes.subject
                                    Main Themes

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein/themes

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/frankenstein

# data[].attributes.headline
          Always Available on OverDrive and Libby

# data[].attributes.subject
          Always Available on OverDrive and Libby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing God and attempting the engineering of life.

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing God and attempting the engineering of life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons t...