There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin and the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft (who died a few days after giving birth to her), she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at 16; wandered through Europe with him; bore their four children; married him; became the friend and companion of the other Young Romantics and their lovers; and at 18 wrote the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Scholars, writers and biographers from Muriel Spark to Miranda Seymour have been drawn to her story, and to the moment when, in the summer of 1816, at a villa on Lake Geneva, Byron challenged Mary, Percy and their friend, the painter Polidori, to write competing ghost stories.
Frankenstein was conceived then, but delivered two years later, and published anonymously on New Year’s Day 1818. Mary would write a revised and expanded version in 1831, plus five other novels and many stories; but none was as innovative, archetypal and aesthetically influential as Frankenstein.
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