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Mary Shelley 
Mary Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, is best known as the author of Frankenstein 
(1818). (See page 191.) Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was a radical political 
philosopher and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was also a radical writer, responsible for the 
famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. 
Frankenstein is a Gothic horror story in the tradition established in the late eighteenth 
century by Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford and Horace Walpole (see page 189). The story 
concerns the creation by Frankenstein, an idealistic scientist, of a living creature from the bones 
of the dead. Frankenstein believes he has found the secret of creating life, but his creation turns 
out to be a destructive monster which no one, not even Frankenstein, can control. Frankenstein, 
together with other novels by Mary Shelley such as the futuristic The Last Man (1826), Caleb 
Williams by her father William Godwin (1794), C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) 
and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), continued 
the Gothic traditions established at the end of the eighteenth century. The importance of this 
tradition is underscored by the way in which it is satirised in novels in the Romantic period, such 
as Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and later Gryll Grange. In the 
context of the Romantic period of literature, ‘Gothic’ writers are central insofar as they continue 
a tradition which challenges the emphasis on reason, control and order which characterises early 
eighteenth-century literature. Gothic novels such asFrankenstein explore the deepest recesses of 
human psychology, always stressing the macabre, the unusual and the fantastic and preferring 
the realities of the subjective imagination. Frankenstein underlines a shift in sensibility and a 
movement towards the uncanny, the marvellous, the rationally uncontrollable and the 
psychologically disjunctive. Such a shift also has political repercussions in that the worlds 

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depicted represent a clear challenge to the existing order and to rational modes of thought and of 
social organisation. The Gothic novels of the Romantic period were to exert a considerable 
influence on the novels of the nineteenth century. Novels by Dickens and the Brontлs, the 
romances of R.L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the ‘fantastic’ science fiction of H.G. 
Wells, the melodramas of Victorian fiction and drama were all to be a part of a continuing 
exploration of increasingly mainstream ‘Gothic’ themes and preoccupations. The Gothic is a 
subversive tradition in writing (as well as in modern film), though it should never be forgotten 
that it attracts and continues to attract a wide and popularaudience. In the Victorian period, 
Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, in particular,emerged as bestselling novelists of the 
sinister and supernatural. In America in thenineteenth century the works of Edgar Allan Poe 
derivesubstantially from these roots. Inthe Modern period this tradition of the Romantic Gothic 
novelhas continued with writers such as Ruth Rendell and Angela Carter.