Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Liverpool University Press, 2000)ĭaisy Hay, The Making of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Bodleian Library, 2019) Michael Rossington at Newcastle Universityįrankenstein: Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the image of a literary family – Bodleian Libraryįrankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus - The Shelley-Godwin ArchiveĬhris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Clarendon Press, 1990)Į. Karen O'Brien at the University of Oxford Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of Hull Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford The image of Mary Shelley, above, was first exhibited in 1840.

Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was 18, prompted by a competition she had with Byron and her husband Percy Shelley to tell a ghost story while they were rained in in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. Rejected by all humans who see him, the monster takes his revenge on Frankenstein, killing those dear to him.

In a programme first broadcast in May 2019, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley's (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names.

In search of mary shelley