For those actions Zeus punishes him by having an eagle pluck out his liver every night. The novel’s subtitle, “Or, the Modern Prometheus,” evokes the first great scientist of Greek mythology who in various versions teaches medicine and science, steals fire from Zeus and gives it to humanity, or creates a human being from clay. Victor Frankenstein who, with the best of intentions of restoring health and prolonging life, undertook to create an eight foot tall human being (subsequently referred to as “daemon” and “fiend”) made of body parts collected from exhumed graves. By morning Mary had outlined hers, centering on a quintessential “mad scientist” Dr. Mary began the novel one stormy night in the Swiss Alps when her husband Percy and his friend Lord Byron each undertook to write a ghost story. 1840 ( left), and a page from a draft manuscript of Frankenstein, 1816 ( right). She was also energized by a series of personal traumas that fueled her feverish story: ten days after her birth her mother died from puerperal fever, at seventeen she eloped with Percy who abandoned his wife, the following year her premature illegitimate child died shortly after being born and her half-sister Fanny Godwin committed suicide, a couple of months later Percy’s wife committed suicide, and just before the publication of the novel Mary gave birth to a daughter, indicating that during a good part of the novel’s composition she was pregnant and in mourning, overloaded with images of birth and death. Thus was this precocious and gifted writer poised to dramatize the clash of two cultures-the Enlightenment that celebrated reason and science and the Romantic age that celebrated passion and art. She was in a privileged position to craft this rich cultural-historical document because her father William Godwin was a leading enlightenment philosopher, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer English feminist who defended the rights of women, and her husband Percy Shelley was a leading romantic poet.

Title page of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 1818. It has become a classic of English literature. Over two hundred years ago Mary Shelley, at age nineteen, published the gothic novel Frankenstein.

Frankenstein by Robert Horton