Her adoration of her father placed her in competition with her stepmother, and to keep peace Godwin shipped her off to boarding schools and foster homes in Scotland. Separated from her beloved yet domineering father for months at a time, Mary developed an independent spirit and creative receptivity that enabled her to elope with a married man in her sixteenth year.

Percy Shelley was, of course, no ordinary lover. Handsome, charismatic, brilliant, and idealistic, the poet had been a guest at her father’s house many times and was greatly esteemed by the hard-to-please Godwin. Taking cues from her father, Mary listened to Shelley’s discussions of radical politics and free love, and the pretty, auburn-haired daughter of the great philosopher captured the poet’s imagination as well. Convinced by Shelley that true love knew no law, determined to practice the unconventional social and artistic principles that had shaped her existence thus far, Mary left her father’s house a month before her seventeenth birthday. The couple lived on the road, and from hand to mouth. Neither set of parents approved of their union. They toured Europe, wrote daily, exchanged ideas with revolutionaries and progressive thinkers, and had two children within two years. They finally rested at Byron’s Villa Diodati in Switzerland for a few months in 1816.

Mary’s adoration for Shelley knew no boundaries, and she clung to him tightly as he danced her through this breathless, passionate lifestyle. Her put her through many emotional trials as a less-than-faithful partner and less-than-caring father, but he also recognized her artistic potential and encouraged her to write. Energized by her declaration of independence from her father, inspired by Shelley’s faith in her ability, and eager to please him at all costs, Mary must have felt that much was at stake when she pledged to write a ghost story on the night of June 16 (a story she relates with some embellishment, but great flair, in the 1831 “Author’s Introduction” to Frankenstein). Her half-sister Claire, Shelley, Byron, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, had all agreed to do so as well, but Mary was the only one of the group who actually finished her tale. (Polidori ultimately incorporated Byron’s idea for his story in The Vampyre: A Tale [1819].) A discussion between Byron and Shelley on the “nature and principle of life” captured the young mother’s interest, and she began working on a story about a student who created a “hideous phantasm” of a human being. Shelley encouraged Mary to expand the tale, and with his assistance (plus the relatively stable home life they shared living in Marlow, England, in 1817), she completed her first novel and published it in January 1818.

Four and a half years later, Mary’s personal and writing lives were irrevocably altered. Her final pregnancy ended in a near-fatal miscarriage in June 18 2 2; the next month, any hope of having another child with Shelley ended with his accidental and untimely death. The love of her life, as well as her creative inspiration and publishing liaison, was gone. Protracted negotiations with Sir Timothy, Shelley’s disapproving father, resulted in only a modest living allowance for her son, Percy. So Mary was forced to write for other reasons besides developing and fulfilling her aesthetic ideals. Indeed, many of her later works are notably less ambitious and innovative than Frankenstein. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830) is a three-volume historical fiction in the style of Sir Walter Scott, who made a small fortune as a novelist in the 1810s and 1820s. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are domestic fictions that recycle many of the conventions of that genre; in both novels, Mary reused literary techniques, such as flashbacks and multiple viewpoints, that she had more creatively employed in Frankenstein.

That is not to say Frankenstein stands in Shelley’s canon as the only original and provocative work. The Last Man (1826), for example, caught the attention of early Shelleyan critics like Elizabeth Nitchie and Muriel Spark, and has been offered in several new editions since 1965. The novel’s theme is as monumental and ambitious as Frankenstein’s: the complete annihilation of the world’s population from the eyes of its single survivor, Lionel Verney. Mary wrestles with many of the themes of Frankenstein, including the disruptive nature of human desire and the psychological burden of family relationships. But The Last Man does not reiterate Frankenstein in any way; where her first novel allowed for a dim hope for humankind in the relenting figure of Robert Walton, The Last Man is bleak and hopeless in its indictment of humanity’s weakness and doom. Mary’s sense of isolation after the deaths of her husband, children, and friends clearly color this dark work, giving its proto-existentialism an authentic and close feel.

“… the corpse of my dead mother in my arms …”

Though Shelley put much of herself into the creation of works like The Last Man, there is still reason to consider Frankenstein her favored child. It is her first singular creative effort—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) was begun earlier but had its start in a journal kept by her husband and herself. Unlike Valperga (1823), a historical novel set in thirteenth-century Tuscany, Frankenstein is set in a place and time she knew and loved: the Scottish Highlands that had inspired her as a girl, and the French and Swiss countryside that she had explored with Shelley. Frankenstein was also the only enduring literary work she created while married to Percy. Mary herself seems to have thought of the text in this way: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she announced at the end of the “Author’s Introduction” of 1831 (p.