I became fascinated by Mary Shelley and her most famous novel because of her husband. Back in 2011, I found myself trying to make sense of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry. It was a tricky assignment. Percy was above all a creature of his own cultural moment, and nothing dates like a zeitgeist. Yet Mary’s Frankenstein comes out of just the same heady cultural and political nexus as her husband’s verse, and her novel has continued to fascinate us. Two hundred years after its publication in January 1818, it still speaks to us directly as a myth about contemporary life. It has inspired film adaptations across genres, from the comedy caper Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to the quasi-rock opera The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner. Then there’s the apparently endless schlock and kitsch in comics and cosplay (where fans dress up as their favourite fictional characters). It has become the go-to journalistic shorthand for technological interventions in human biology or medical science: Dr Frankenstein and his creature make their way in the mainstream of modern life. They reappear in our fantasies and nightmares more consistently than most fictional or historical characters. Now we can expect a slew of new Frankensteins, as everyone’s favourite scar-faced shuffling giant and his creator are remade for a new time.
Mary has been much researched, all too often in terms of whether she was good or bad for Percy. But she hadn’t been placed at the centre of her own story since Miranda Seymour’s magisterial biography in 2000. I wanted to discover a Mary Shelley for our times: to find the girl behind the book, and to reconstruct what writing it must have been like. Continue reading from The Guardian
Bride of Frankenstein (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Frankenstein: Behind the Monster Smash (BBC)
Frankenstein has Become a True Monster (Wall Street Journal)
Frankenstein the Character (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The Horror Story that Haunts Science (Science Magazine)
How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein (History Channel)
Man as God: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Turns 200 (NPR)
Movies Inspired by the Book Frankenstein (Screen Rant)
The Original Frankenstein Film (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Plans for Frankenstein Museum (BBC)
Plot Summary, Characters & Themes in Shelley's Frankenstein (BBC)
