The popular imagination has taken Frankenstein and run with it. Thus 18-year-old Shelley began to write Frankenstein. As Mary Shelley tells it, they had all been reading ghost stories, including Coleridge’s Christabel (Coleridge had visited her father at the family house when Shelley was young), when Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. In 1816 the Shelleys visited Switzerland, staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they were Byron’s neighbours. The Shelleys also had a close association with the poet Lord Byron, and it is this association that brings us to Frankenstein. And it ultimately came to an early end in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned, his small boat lost in a storm off the Italian coast. It was crossed with outside love interests, illegitimate children, suicides, debt, wondering and wandering. Their relationship seems to epitomise the Romantic era itself. When she was 16, Shelley eloped with radical poet Percy Shelley, whose Ozymandias (1818) is still regularly quoted (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).ĭouglas Walton Percy Shelley Elsa Lanchester Mary Shelley and Gavin Gordon Lord Byron in the film The Bride of Frankenstein. Shelley’s father was William Godwin, political philosopher and founder of “philosophical anarchism” – he was anti-government in the moment that the great democracies of France and the United States were being born. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was, according to that book’s introduction, “the first major feminist”. Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the heart of what might be the greatest celebrity story of all time. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.
It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. It is a Gothic novel in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche. Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation. In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.įrankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
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