Mary Shelley & the Birth of Frankenstein

What does it take to write one of the most enduring novels in human history at eighteen years old, in the middle of a volcanic winter, surrounded by grief? In this episode of the Brit Lit Book Club, we dive deep into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, tracing the extraordinary life behind one of Gothic literature's greatest masterworks.

We explore Mary's radical inheritance: daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin — and the personal tragedies that shaped her obsession with creation, loss, and the desperate wish to undo death. We journey to the shores of Lake Geneva, where the stormy summer of 1816 gave birth to the famous ghost story competition and, ultimately, to the spark of Frankenstein itself.

Along the way, we discuss why the creature is not the villain of this novel, how Mary Shelley invented science fiction while drawing on the very real and very fashionable science of Galvanism, and why the 1931 Boris Karloff film, brilliant as it is, robbed the creature of his most essential quality: his eloquence.

We also look at Frankenstein's extraordinary legacy, from the National Theatre's 2011 Benedict Cumberbatch production to its DNA running through every conversation we're currently having about artificial intelligence and the ethics of creation. That question has never felt more urgent.

In this episode:

• Mary Wollstonecraft's radical legacy and its influence on Frankenstein
• The Year Without a Summer and the Villa Diodati ghost story competition
• Why the 1818 first edition differs — and why it matters
• The feminist and humanist reading of the creature
• Gothic literature's origins and how Mary Shelley transformed the tradition
• Literary pilgrimage sites related to Mary Shelley

Perfect for: fans of Gothic literature, British literary history, feminist literary criticism, science fiction origins, the Romantic era, and literary travel.

📚 Reading List

Start Here: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Penguin Classics) — Mary Shelley The original, unrevised edition — rawer, more radical, and more interesting than the commonly reprinted 1831 version. This Penguin edition includes an introduction by Charlotte Gordon and notes that place Mary in a feminist literary legacy.

Biography: Mary Shelley — Miranda Seymour The gold-standard life of Shelley. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written — the kind of biography that reads like a novel and leaves you feeling you've lost a friend when it's over.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley — Charlotte Gordon A National Book Critics Circle Award winner that tells the story of both mother and daughter in alternating chapters — two women who never knew each other but shared a literary and feminist legacy. This one will absolutely wreck you in the best way possible.

The Gothic Tradition: The Mysteries of Udolpho (Penguin Classics) — Ann Radcliffe The Gothic novel that defined the genre before Mary Shelley came along and revolutionized it. Atmospheric, suspenseful, and surprisingly modern in its psychological depth.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dover Thrift Editions) — Robert Louis Stevenson The perfect companion piece to Frankenstein — another Victorian scientist who meddles with the boundaries of human nature and destroys himself in the process. Read them together for a masterclass in how the Gothic tradition evolved across the 19th century.

The Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin Classics) — Mary Wollstonecraft To understand where Frankenst

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Transcript

🎙️ THE BRIT LIT BOOK CLUB

Episode Script: Mary Shelley & the Birth of Frankenstein

VANESSA: Hello and welcome back to the Brit Lit Book Club — the podcast where we travel through the greatest stories in British literature, and sometimes, if you're lucky, through the English countryside too. I'm your host, Vanessa, and today we are diving into one of the most electrifying, emotionally devastating, and genuinely revolutionary books ever written.

I'm talking about Frankenstein — but more than that, I want to talk about the woman who wrote it. Because the story of Mary Shelley is, in many ways, just as extraordinary as the novel itself. A teenage girl, grieving, brilliant, and surrounded by some of the most dazzling and destructive minds of the 19th century, sat down during a stormy summer in Switzerland and invented modern science fiction. She also wrote one of the most profound meditations on creation, responsibility, loneliness, and what it means to be human that literature has ever produced.

So settle in. Brew yourself something wonderful. 

☕ TEA PAIRING

For this episode, I'm drinking a dark masala chai. Masala chai is made with bold black tea and a blend of warming spices: cardamom, clove, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper. It's rich, complex, a little bit dangerous. something alchemical. Which is exactly the right energy for a story about a man who locks himself in a laboratory and tries to cheat death. Make it strong, add warm milk, maybe a little honey, and let it steep while we get into the story. If you want it truly authentic, simmer the spices directly in the milk rather than using a bag — the difference is remarkable, and Victor Frankenstein would absolutely approve of that level of obsessive dedication to the process.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

PART ONE: WHO WAS MARY SHELLEY?

VANESSA: To understand Frankenstein, you really do have to understand Mary Shelley's life — because this isn't a case where the biography is a fun bonus. It's essential. The novel is soaked in her personal history in a way that's almost overwhelming once you start to see it.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30th, 1797, in London — specifically in Somers Town, just north of what is now King's Cross. And from her very first breath, she was living in the shadow of extraordinary people.

Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft — and if that name rings a bell, it should. Wollstonecraft was one of the most radical thinkers of the 18th century, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. She was a proto-feminist before feminism even had a name. She argued that women weren't naturally inferior to men — they were simply denied the education and opportunity to prove otherwise. She was brave, controversial, brilliant, and deeply unconventional in her personal life too. She had a daughter out of wedlock, attempted suicide twice, and refused to be boxed in by the expectations of her time.

Tragically, Mary Wollstonecraft died just eleven days after giving birth to her daughter — from complications of childbirth. Mary Shelley grew up never knowing her mother, but living entirely in the mythology of her. There were portraits of Wollstonecraft throughout the house. Her books were on every shelf. Her father spoke of her constantly. And young Mary would apparently go to her mother's grave in St Pancras Old Church in London to read — sitting beside the headstone, surrounded by the quiet of that churchyard, feeling close to a woman she never got to meet.

That image absolutely stops me every time. And that churchyard is still there. If you ever find yourself in London, it's an extraordinary and quietly moving place to visit — there's even a monument to Wollstonecraft in the gardens nearby. It's the kind of place that makes literature feel very, very real.

Her father was William Godwin — also a radical philosopher, an anarchist in the true intellectual sense, the author of Political Justice. So Mary grew up in a household that was basically a salon for the most progressive, provocative thinkers in England. Writers, philosophers, and free thinkers were constantly passing through. It was an extraordinary education — informal, electric, and completely unlike anything available to most women of her day.

PART TWO: PERCY, ELOPEMENT & EARLY TRAGEDY

VANESSA: Now, we have to talk about Percy Bysshe Shelley, because you simply cannot tell Mary's story without him — though I will say upfront that their relationship was complicated in ways that deserve real honesty.

Percy Shelley was a poet. A genuinely gifted, blazingly idealistic, charismatic, and also deeply irresponsible poet. He was already married — to a woman named Harriet — when he became a fixture in William Godwin's household and fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Mary. By 1814, the two of them had eloped to France, taking Mary's stepsister Claire along with them, living on almost no money, traveling through a Europe still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars.

They were rejected by their families. They faced real poverty. And within months of their elopement, Mary became pregnant. Their first baby — a daughter — was born prematurely in February 1815 and died twelve days later. Mary recorded in her diary: "Find my baby dead. A most miserable day." She was just seventeen years old.

This loss haunted her. She dreamed about the baby. She wrote about bringing her back to life. You can draw an almost unbearably direct line from that grief to the central obsession of Frankenstein — the desperate, dangerous desire to undo death, to reanimate what has been lost.

In 1816, she had a son, William — named after her father. But loss would keep following her. Between 1815 and 1819, Mary Shelley lost three of her four children. Her dear friend Fanny Imlay — her half-sister — took her own life in 1816. Harriet, Percy's abandoned wife, drowned herself later that same year. And Percy himself would die in 1822, when his boat capsized in a storm off the coast of Italy. He was twenty-nine years old. Mary was twenty-four, and widowed, with one surviving child.

She outlived almost everyone she loved. And she never remarried.

PART THREE: THE SUMMER THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

VANESSA: But let's go back to the summer of 1816 — because this is where Frankenstein was born, and it is one of the most extraordinary stories in all of literary history.

The spring and summer of 1816 is known as "The Year Without a Summer." In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted — the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The ash cloud spread across the globe, blocking sunlight, dropping temperatures, destroying harvests. 1816 was cold, dark, and relentlessly gloomy across Europe. In many parts of the world, it caused famine and social unrest. In Switzerland, it created the gothic atmosphere for one of the greatest literary experiments ever attempted.

Mary and Percy traveled to Geneva that summer, along with Claire Clairmont — who was, at this point, having an affair with Lord Byron. Byron himself was in exile from England after a particularly spectacular personal scandal involving rumors of incest with his half-sister and the complete collapse of his marriage. He rented the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, a grand and atmospheric property overlooking the water. Mary, Percy, and Claire stayed nearby at a smaller cottage called Maison Chapuis, and the group spent long evenings together at the Villa, talking, reading, and watching the storms roll in across the lake.

Now — Byron had a personal physician and companion with him named John Polidori, and this group of five brilliant, restless, Romantic minds, essentially trapped indoors by a volcanic winter, did what any of us would do: they entertained each other with ghost stories. Byron proposed a competition. Each of them would write a horror story. Byron himself wrote a fragment. Polidori eventually turned his contribution into The Vampyre — the direct literary ancestor of Dracula. And eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, after several days of feeling she had nothing to contribute, woke from a waking dream — a vivid, terrifying vision of a pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together, watching it stir to life.

That was the spark of Frankenstein.

The Villa Diodati still exists. It's a private home today, but you can walk past it and stand by the lakeside and look across the water — and if you happen to be there on a stormy evening, I promise you will feel something. The atmosphere around Lake Geneva, particularly looking up toward the mountains, has this wild, sublime quality that Mary describes so beautifully in the novel. It's one of those places that simply feels Gothic. It's not on our current tour itinerary, but it is absolutely the kind of destination I have my eye on for future Book Club Tour adventures — so watch this space.

PART FOUR: THE BOOK ITSELF

VANESSA: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published on January 1st, 1818. Mary was twenty years old. And here is the detail that never fails to astonish me: it was published anonymously. The first edition carried a preface written by Percy Shelley, and most readers simply assumed he had written it. The idea that a teenage girl had produced this philosophically dense, structurally sophisticated, emotionally devastating novel was, apparently, inconceivable to the literary world of 1818.

When the second edition was published in 1823, Mary's name finally appeared on the cover. She was twenty-five. The secret was out.

The novel is structured as a series of nested narratives — a letter writer reports the account of Captain Walton, who relays the story of Victor Frankenstein, who in turn quotes the creature's own account of his life. It's a brilliantly designed structure that keeps asking the reader: whose story is this, really? Who are we supposed to believe? Who deserves our sympathy?

And that question is at the heart of why Frankenstein is so much more than a horror story.

The creature — and I want to be clear that Mary never calls him a monster, never gives him a name, never presents him as simply evil — teaches himself to read by secretly observing a family in the woods. He discovers literature, history, and philosophy. He reads Milton's Paradise Lost and sees himself as Adam — but an Adam abandoned by his creator, cast out before he could be loved. He longs for connection, for belonging, for someone to look at him without revulsion. And when he is rejected — repeatedly, violently, by every human he encounters, including Victor himself — he turns to destruction. Not because he is inherently monstrous, but because he has been made monstrous by the cruelty of others.

That is the feminist reading, the humanist reading, the reading that makes this novel timeless: the creature is not the villain. Abandonment is.

PART FIVE: GOTHIC LEGACY & WHAT CAME NEXT

VANESSA: Frankenstein sits at the very heart of the Gothic literary tradition — that rich, dark vein of British literature that runs from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto in 1764, through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and of course straight into the Victorian era with Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The Gothic isn't just about scares — it's about the things that polite society doesn't want to look at. Hidden secrets, repressed desires, the supernatural as a metaphor for the psychological.

Mary Shelley took that tradition and did something no one had done before: she grounded it in science. Victor Frankenstein isn't a sorcerer. He's a student of natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany — a real institution with real scientific prestige. His obsession with reanimating life was directly inspired by the very real and very fashionable science of galvanism — Luigi Galvani's experiments in the 1780s and 90s demonstrating that electrical currents could cause the muscles of dead frogs to twitch. By the time Mary was writing, scientists were performing public galvanic experiments on human corpses in London, and audiences were both horrified and enthralled.

She took that genuine scientific anxiety — the fear of what happens when human ambition outruns human wisdom — and turned it into literature. In doing so, she invented science fiction. Not as a genre label — that came much later — but as a mode of storytelling that uses scientific possibility to explore ethical and philosophical questions. Every science fiction story you have ever loved, from H.G. Wells to Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood to Jurassic Park, owes a debt to this twenty-year-old woman and her stormy Swiss summer.

PART SIX: FRANKENSTEIN IN MODERN CULTURE

VANESSA: The cultural footprint of Frankenstein is almost impossible to overstate. We should probably start with the most iconic image of all — and immediately complicate it.

In 1931, Universal Pictures released the film Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, with makeup designer Jack Pierce creating the now-iconic flat-topped, bolt-necked creature that has become the dominant image in popular culture. It was a masterpiece of horror cinema, and Karloff's performance was genuinely moving — but it also did something very significant to the story. It stripped away the creature's eloquence, his philosophy, his devastating interiority. The film's creature barely speaks. He is a monster, full stop. The book's creature quotes Paradise Lost. There is a profound difference.

This is one of the most interesting gaps between literary original and cultural adaptation — and it's worth asking why it happened. Is it easier, or more comforting, to have a creature who is simply terrifying? If the creature can speak, can reason, can articulate his suffering — then we have to grapple with our own culpability. If he's just a monster, we don't.

Beyond that 1931 film, Frankenstein has spawned hundreds of adaptations — films, plays, musicals, graphic novels, and television series. The most thoughtful recent adaptation is arguably the National Theatre's 2011 stage production, directed by Danny Boyle, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the roles of Victor and the creature at different performances — a brilliant theatrical choice that underscores the book's argument that creator and creation are reflections of each other.

And the legacy continues today. We can see the DNA of Frankenstein in virtually every story about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the ethics of creation. When we debate the rights of AI systems, or the ethics of cloning, or designer babies, or bringing back extinct species — we are essentially having the argument that Mary Shelley started in 1818. Victor Frankenstein's crime wasn't that he created life. It was that he refused to take responsibility for what he'd made. That question — what do we owe to the things we bring into the world? — has never felt more urgent.

PART SEVEN: PLACES TO VISIT

VANESSA: Now, a little something for those of you who like to walk in the footsteps of your favorite authors — and if you're a regular listener, I know that's most of you!

Mary Shelley doesn't have quite the same concentration of preserved literary sites as Jane Austen or the Brontës, partly because she spent so much of her life abroad and partly because she moved around frequently after Percy's death. But there are some genuinely wonderful places to seek out.

In London: As I mentioned, St Pancras Old Church and its gardens are deeply connected to Mary — her mother is buried there, and it's where she and Percy first declared their love. It's a truly atmospheric spot, tucked behind the bustle of King's Cross. The nearby British Library also holds original manuscripts from the Shelley circle if you're interested in archival treasures.

In Bath: Percy and Mary spent time in Bath in 1816, and it's a city already deeply associated with Gothic fiction through the work of our beloved Jane Austen — specifically Northanger Abbey, which is itself a Gothic parody. Our Jane Austen Bath Tour is the perfect way to immerse yourself in that world, and you can absolutely layer a Shelley sensibility onto that visit.

Further afield: The Swiss Lakes and the Alps — which feature so dramatically in Frankenstein, particularly in the sublime mountain scenes — are, of course, a journey further than our current English tours, but for anyone planning independent travel, the area around Lake Geneva and Chamonix is unlike anywhere else on earth. The sublime landscape Mary describes — those vast, inhuman peaks that make Victor feel both awed and terrified — is completely real, and completely breathtaking.

And if you want to stay in England and connect with Gothic literary tradition more broadly, Yorkshire is absolutely the place. The moors, the wild landscape, the sense of isolation and brooding atmosphere — it's the same tradition that Mary Shelley was working within, the same landscape that would inspire Emily Brontë just a couple of decades later. Our Brontë Country Tour takes you right into the heart of that world, and if you're a Frankenstein fan, the thematic resonances are remarkable. You can find details at thebookclubtour.com.

PART EIGHT: THE FEMINIST LENS

VANESSA: I want to come back to something before we close, because I think it deserves its own moment.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a teenager, in the shadow of a radical feminist mother she never met, alongside men who were celebrated as geniuses while she was overlooked. The novel is, among many other things, a story about what happens when men play God without women — when creation is entirely male, sterile of the warmth and relationship that sustains life. Victor never involves his fiancée Elizabeth in his work. He creates life without love. He abandons his creation without care. He is, in the most profound sense, a bad parent — and the novel argues that this failure of nurture is catastrophic.

There's also a compelling reading of the creature as a figure for the female experience — a being denied agency, authorship, a name, recognition, and love; forced to observe the world from the outside; judged on appearance rather than substance; and eventually destroyed not for what he does but for what he represents. When you read those passages in the novel where the creature watches the De Lacey family through a crack in the wall, longing to be included, learning language and love from a distance he can never close — it is genuinely heartbreaking.

Mary Shelley knew what it was to be brilliant and invisible. The first edition didn't even have her name on it.

OUTRO

VANESSA: Mary Shelley lived until 1851 — she was fifty-three when she died, in London, of what is believed to have been a brain tumor. She outlived Percy by nearly thirty years. She spent those decades writing, editing, and working to preserve Percy's literary legacy, but also producing her own substantial body of work — novels, short stories, travel writing, and biography.

Her heart — and this is a detail almost too Gothic to be believed — was found wrapped in a silk parcel in her desk after her death. Percy's heart, which had been recovered from his funeral pyre on the Italian beach and given to Mary, had been kept there for nearly three decades. She had carried it with her, literally, for thirty years.

I don't think any of us can read Frankenstein the same way after knowing that.

So this week, I invite you to pick up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein — or perhaps return to it if you've read it before — and read it not as a horror story, but as a love letter and a lament. A meditation on creation and abandonment, on the monsters we make and the monsters we become. And do brew yourself a Lapsang Souchong while you're at it.

If you're interested in exploring Gothic literary landscapes in person, our Brontë Country Tour is a beautiful way to step into that world, and I'm also planning something very special in Yorkshire — more details coming very soon, so make sure you're on the mailing list at thebookclubtour.com.

Until next time — happy reading, happy traveling, and as always, keep the kettle on.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

📝 EPISODE NOTES / SHOW NOTES SUGGESTIONS

Books to recommend:

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818 text vs. the revised 1831 text — worth discussing the differences!)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
• The Vampyre by John Polidori
• Making of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Esther Schor

Adaptations to mention in show notes:

• 1931 Universal Frankenstein (dir. James Whale)
• National Theatre Live: Frankenstein (2011, dir. Danny Boyle) — available to stream
• Mary Shelley (2017 biopic starring Elle Fanning)

Tour links to include:

• Brontë Country Tour
• Jane Austen Bath Tour
• Mailing list signup for the upcoming Yorkshire retreat

Gothic Classics (the tradition Dracula sits within)

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole — the novel that arguably started the entire Gothic genre in 1764, short and wonderfully strange
• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe — the Gothic queen who came before them all
• The Monk by Matthew Lewis — darker and more scandalous than Radcliffe, not for the faint-hearted
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson — published just eleven years before Dracula and wrestling with the exact same Victorian anxieties about the hidden self
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde — another Irish outsider writing Gothic horror in London, the parallels with Stoker are fascinating
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James — the ghost story as psychological horror, published the year after Dracula

Vampire Literature (before and after Stoker)

• The Vampyre by John Polidori — the very first vampire story in English literature, born from the same Villa Diodati ghost story competition as Frankenstein
• Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu — a deeply influential novella featuring a female vampire, published 26 years before Dracula and almost certainly read by Stoker. Le Fanu was also Irish, which is a wonderful connection
• Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice — the novel that reinvented the vampire for the 20th century

Modern Gothic & Dracula-Adjacent

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova — a richly researched novel that takes Dracula's mythology seriously and traces it through Eastern Europe, perfect for literary travelers
• Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker — a collection of his short stories, including what is believed to be the deleted opening chapter of Dracula itself
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield — contemporary Gothic fiction that feels deeply rooted in the Victorian tradition, wonderful for book clubs
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia — a more recent Gothic novel that shows how alive the tradition is today

Mary Shelley: A Biography by Miranda Seymour (2000) — this is the gold standard. Thoroughly researched but written with real warmth and narrative flair, it reads almost like a novel itself. Perfect for your audience because it doesn't require any prior academic knowledge but doesn't talk down to readers either. This would be my strong recommendation to mention on air.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon (2015) — this one is particularly special because it tells the story of both mother and daughter in alternating chapters, weaving their two lives together even though they never met. For an episode that spends so much time on Mary's relationship with her mother's ghost, this is a deeply resonant read.

The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo (2013) — focuses specifically on the scientific context of Frankenstein, the galvanism experiments, the grave robbing, the anatomy schools. Fantastic if your listeners want to go deeper on the science and history behind the novel.

Before I let you go, I want to leave you with a little reading list — because if Frankenstein has lit something up in you today, there is so much more to explore.

First and most obviously, if you haven't read Frankenstein itself — please do. And if you have, I'd encourage you to seek out the 1818 first edition text rather than the more commonly reprinted 1831 revision. Mary made significant changes to the later edition, toning down some of the more radical elements and adding a more fatalistic, almost religious framework. The 1818 text is rawer, younger, and in many ways more interesting. Several modern editions publish both texts side by side, which is a wonderful way to see a writer in conversation with her younger self.

For biography, I have two recommendations. The first is Miranda Seymour's Mary Shelley, published in 2000 — it is the gold standard life of Shelley, thoroughly researched and beautifully written, the kind of biography that reads like a novel and leaves you feeling you've lost a friend when it's over. The second is Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley — and this one is particularly special. It tells the story of both mother and daughter in alternating chapters, weaving their two lives together across time even though they never met. Given everything we talked about today — Mary reading at her mother's grave, growing up in the shadow of a woman she never knew — this book will absolutely wreck you in the best possible way. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you want to understand the literary tradition that Frankenstein was born from and helped to shape, I'd suggest two companions. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho — published in 1794, just three years before Mary Shelley was born — is the Gothic novel that defined the genre before Mary came along and revolutionized it. It's atmospheric, suspenseful, and surprisingly modern in its psychological depth. And then Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886, is the perfect companion piece to Frankenstein — another story about a scientist who meddles with the boundaries of human nature and destroys himself in the process. Reading them together is a masterclass in how the Gothic tradition evolved across the 19th century.

And finally — if our episode today has made you curious about Mary's mother, please do read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was published in 1792, it is fiercely intelligent and surprisingly readable, and knowing that this was the woman whose grave young Mary sat beside to do her reading makes every page feel electric. To understand where Frankenstein came from, you have to understand Mary Shelley. And to understand Mary Shelley, you have to begin with her mother.