Mary Shelley

Who Was Mary Shelley?

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) — the novel that founded the genre of science fiction and that remains, two centuries after its composition, one of the most theologically rich and most frequently misread texts in English literature. Born to two of the most famous radical intellectuals of the age — her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and her father was William Godwin, author of Political Justice — she grew up in an environment of intense intellectual and political engagement.

She began writing Frankenstein at eighteen, during the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, and published it anonymously in 1818. The novel’s full title — Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus — signals its central concern: the myth of the human being who steals fire from the gods and suffers the consequences, rendered in the specific idiom of the early nineteenth century’s encounter with scientific power.

Mary Shelley is significant for TLA because her novel raises, with unusual precision, the questions that the scientific and technological revolution has been forcing on Western culture ever since: what are the limits of human creative power? What are the responsibilities of the creator to the creature? And what happens when the creature, endowed with consciousness and desire, finds itself in a world that did not ask for it and does not want it?

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus — 1818, revised 1831
• The Last Man — 1826 — post-apocalyptic novel
• Valperga — 1823 — historical novel
• Lodore — 1835