In 1816, when eighteen-year old Mary Godwin began writing Frankenstein, the idea that a woman could dream up such a tale was as far-fetched as raising a being from the dead. But Mary wasn’t just any woman. The daughter of two notorious radicals, Mary had become an outcast from English society when she was only sixteen. A lifelong advocate for the rights of women, she refused to be governed by social conventions, running away with a married man, having children out of wedlock, and authoring books, stories, and essays that broke literary conventions.
This Very Short Introduction explores the context, background, and important themes contained in Shelley’s most famous novel, Frankenstein, as well as demonstrating the importance of her work after Frankenstein. Over the course of her long career, Shelley developed a distinctive voice, and a political and philosophical stance. Exploring key themes throughout Shelley’s work, Charlotte Gordon shows how she devoted herself to the propositions her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: that women are equal to men; that all people deserve the same rights; that human reason and the capacity for love can reform the world; and that every person is entitled to justice and freedom.

Charlotte Gordon’s new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history. Wollstonecraft published the first full articulation of women’s rights in 1792, risking her reputation and sometimes her life in pursuit of her radical goals, while her daughter Mary Shelley wrote the masterpiece Frankenstein in 1819, and famously professed her love to the poet Percy Shelley on her mother’s grave. Although these two women never really knew each other, their lives were so closely intertwined and eerily similar that it seems impossible to consider one without the other: both became writers; both fell in love with brilliant but impossible men and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock; both struggled to negotiate their need for love and companionship with their need for independence. The narrative takes readers from Revolutionary France to the Scottish Highlands, from Victorian England to the canals of Venice, reading like an engrossing historical novel.