Frankenstein

By Mary Shelley

Literary family: daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (early feminist)

Informal education (Well-read, grew up around Coleridge, Lamb, Percy Shelley)

1812: Met Percy Bysshe Shelley at age 15; he was married; they travelled together & had a child (scandalous!)

Summer of 1816: Percy Shelley and Mary met up with Lord Byron and John William Poldiori at Lake Geneva, Switzerland

Byron proposed ghost story contest Frankenstein; Mary was only 19 years old!

Dec. 30, 1816: Mary and Percy are married after his wife Harriet dies

1822: Percy drowns in boating accident

1818: Frankenstein published anonymously

1831: Second edition; Mary Shelley’s name appears on it

Many believed that Percy Shelley wrote it

Framed narrative Misconception:

Monster=Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein =

Doctor who creates the monster

Frontispiece of 1831 edition

Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1756)

An experience that produces both horror and pleasure

Inspires both fear and awe Vast, infinite spaces (the

starry night sky, the ocean) Sublime landscapes: wild

& untamed, not pastoral

Joseph Vernet, “The Shipwreck” (1759)

Thomas Cole, “Romantic Landscape With Ruined Tower” (1832)

J.M.W. Turner, “Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in This Storm on the

Night the Ariel Left Harwich” (1842)