Authors give life to stories; those stories, in turn, may give life to legends. For readers and critics of Mary Shelley, biography, fiction, and mythology are inexorably intertwined. This reality owes something to the accident of fate that made her the daughter of two of the most compelling and controversial thinkers of the age, as well as the choices that made her the wife of a celebrated radical poet. No matter what she wrote, Mary Shelley would likely have been remembered on these grounds alone. Because she produced what has become one of the most widely read novels in the English language, she achieved intellectual attention in her own right. The complexity of Frankenstein ensured that Shelley’s novel would deservedly become the object of critical study. Yet neither of those two aspects, the critical and biographical, quite suffice to explain the rich and multivalent discourse surrounding Mary Shelley. This essay explores how the intersection of the two has been generative of a body of criticism that is both wide-ranging and deeply probing. The improbable circumstances and apparent contradictions surrounding her life and body of work have motivated critics and scholars to work to reconcile understandings of who she was and how she came to produce a story that captured the cultural imagination in a way that has perhaps never been equalled.
Before any criticism was written about Mary Shelley, critics wrote about “the author of Frankenstein.” The first edition of Mary Shelley’s seminal first novel was published anonymously in 1818; many readers and reviewers assumed that it had been written by a man, with Percy Shelley being a popular choice for possible author. The first responses to Frankenstein are therefore unique in Mary Shelley criticism in that they do not have to grapple with a decision about the incorporation of biographical elements. Rather than working to understand the author, they work to understand the text. This process is a challenging one, and the reviews give the distinct impression that the novel, like the creature it features, is a liminal, hybrid thing. Walter Scott begins his review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine with the caution that “This is a novel, or more properly a romantic fiction, of a nature so peculiar, that we ought to describe the species before attempting any account of the individual production” (613). He devotes a significant portion of his review to parsing categories of fiction in an effort to understand what contributions Frankenstein might be making to the evolution of the novel, a topic in which he was keenly interested. His review is a sustained and serious analysis of the speculative pleasures of fiction, and he praises “the author’s original genius and happy power of expression” (620).
Some responses from other reviewers were similarly intrigued, albeit wary. Reviews in The Edinburgh Magazine and La Belle Assemblée both utilize the term “impiety” to articulate their reaction to the dark image of human nature and ambition that the novel holds out. At the same time, these reviews acknowledge a “power of fascination” (Edinburgh 249) and “originality, extreme interest . . . and an easy, yet energetic style” (La Belle Assemblée 142). Others lambasted the novel. John Croker, writing in The Quarterly Review, accused the novel of “leaving the wearied reader, after a struggle between laughter and loathing, in doubt whether the head or the heart of the author be the most diseased” (385). An anonymous reviewer in The British Critic echoed this sentiment: “when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright” (438). Interestingly, this critic had gotten wind of a possible authorial identity and notes with additional disgust that “the writer of it is, we understand, a female” (438).
For the reviewers of the revised edition of Frankenstein, published with significant emendations in 1831, there was no doubt about the author’s identity or gender. The publication of this edition engendered only one new review, published in The Literary Gazette. This review begins, “Vigorous, terrible, and with its interest sustained to the last, Frankenstein is certainly one of the most original works that ever proceeded from a female pen” (740). The review is highly favorable and notes that Shelley’s novel defies expectations stereotypically attributed to women’s writing. This piece, however, also makes it clear that as soon as Mary Shelley’s identity was known, responses to the text found it difficult to separate her personal identity and her writing.
It is important to note that by the time critics responded to the revised edition of the novel, Mary Shelley herself had published a piece of writing that had left an indelible impact on the reception history of Frankenstein and on her critical legacy more generally. The 1831 edition featured a new introduction, which sets out to answer “the question, so frequently asked me—‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’” (360). The question speaks to a number of combined interests. First, there is the foregrounding of two biographical facts: Mary Shelley was a woman, and still in her teens, when she began writing her famous work. Frankenstein would be a surprising and provocative production regardless, but when its conception is linked to a personal account of Mary Shelley’s own life and experiences, it gathers an interest it could not otherwise have.
In her 1831 introduction, Mary Shelley raises what would go on to become one of the foundational questions at the heart of Frankenstein’s long critical legacy. Playing with tropes of both innocence (“a young girl”) and horror (“so hideous an idea”), she creates the desire to uncover just what it was that enabled her to produce a text marked by death, betrayal, and abandonment. This desire is furthered by the content of her masterpiece. The introduction speaks to a set of concerns about inspiration and creativity that loom all the larger for anyone who knows anything about the novel itself. The “hideous idea” that is Frankenstein in its entirety mirrors the hideous idea that obsesses Victor as he relentlessly pursues his project of making the creature. Mary Shelley’s inviting suggestion that she is about to tell the reader the source of her inspiration is a promise of critical resolution as well, for all readers and interpreters who long to know why Victor dreams up his terrible vision.
Mary Shelley describes how the summer of 1816, which she and Percy Shelley spent with George Gordon, Lord Byron in Switzerland, proved “wet [and] ungenial,” (“Introduction” 361) leading Byron to propose, one rainy night, a contest for inventing ghost stories. Mary Shelley struggled with this challenge, aspiring to produce a tale “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horrors” (363). One night, after listening to Percy Shelley and Byron discuss theories of using electricity to animate life, she experienced a dream vision in which she “saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion” (364). Significantly, the creator’s reaction to this success is horror: “supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken” (364). Upon wakening, she began to translate this inspiration into what she first conceived of as “a short tale” (365) but which Percy Shelley urged her to expand into a novel.
By suggesting in her introduction that the conception and origin of the text can be understood biographically, Shelley laid the stage for criticism and biography to become intertwined, both during her lifetime and posthumously. This pattern persisted throughout her complex life and career, particularly after the tragically early death of her husband in 1822. Her second novel to be published, Valperga, appeared in 1823 and was reviewed fairly favorably, though with a sense of disappointment that it did not replicate the originality of Frankenstein. Her subsequent novels (The Last Man in 1826, Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Lodore in 1835, and Falkner in 1837) met with similar responses. She did succeed at becoming well-known as an author of tales and sketches (often published in literary annuals) and as a writer of biographies and travel literature. During this time, she was also dedicated to managing the public reputation of her deceased husband, in hopes of ensuring that his literary legacy would neither be forgotten nor neglected due to his scandalous personal life and controversial political views.
After her death in 1851, an obituary appeared in the Athenaeum, opening with the remark that she had “some years since disappeared from the world of literary occupation” (“Mrs. Shelley”). As would be the case for most of Mary Shelley’s critical history, Frankenstein is singled out as worthy of special notice, as a work that “scared and startled the world by its preternatural power” (“Mrs. Shelley”). The rationale for why none of her subsequent novels achieved the impact of the first is linked to a biographical incident: the death of her husband, which is interpreted as “one of those visitations the traces of which are never to be effaced” (“Mrs. Shelley”). If the reasons for why Mary Shelley wrote could be found in the events of her life, the reasons for why she, apparently, ceased producing writing worthy of note could be as well.
While the degree to which discussions of her husband dominated discourse around Mary Shelley can readily antagonize contemporary readers (the obituary, for example, quotes lines from Percy Shelley’s poem The Revolt of Islam, wherein he describes his love for her but does not feature any of Mary Shelley’s own writing), it likely contributed to keeping her memory alive in the immediate aftermath of her death. Her only surviving son, Percy Florence—who had become Sir Percy after the death of his grandfather—and his wife, Lady Jane Shelley, devoted great energy to both promoting and rehabilitating the image of P.B. Shelley (Sunstein 389). This project was complicated both by the lingering resentments, rivalries, and jealousies of individuals who had been part of the tumultuous social circles in which Mary and Percy Shelley had moved and by a perceived need to present the couple’s ideological viewpoints as more normatively aligned. Mary Shelley, when mentioned either in discussions of her husband’s life or in the two early biographies that appeared (one published in 1886 by Helen Moore and another in 1889 by Florence Marshall), was considered largely in relation to her role as wife, rather than fellow author. Furthering the tendency to emphasize Frankenstein as her only significant publication was the fact that it was the only novel published during the lifetime of Percy Shelley; it was thus only too easy to assume that Mary’s creativity was somehow linked to their relationship. In 1897, when Richard Garnett produced an entry about Mary Shelley for the Dictionary of National Biography, he echoed this sentiment in writing that “Nothing but an absolute magnetizing of her brain by Shelley can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in Frankenstein.” The reason she never produced a comparable work is again given a biographical cause, but here assumed to be the death of her son William in 1819.
For the first half of the twentieth century, little was written to advance critical understandings of Mary Shelley. Richard Church published a biography in 1929 containing some critical discussion of her fiction, as did Glynn Grylls in 1938. In 1944, an edition of Mary’s letters was published, collected and edited by Frederick L. Jones and followed by an edition of her journal in 1947. These works, however, as Miranda Seymour argues “had often been scrubbed of vitality for the sake of decorum” (557). What was more significant in signalling the possibility of a new way of understanding, and perhaps separating, Mary Shelley’s life and works was signalled in 1951, with the publication of Muriel Spark’s biography, Child of Light. Tellingly subtitled, “A Reassessment of Mary Shelley,” the publication coincided with the centennial of Mary Shelley’s death. It also insisted on understanding Mary Shelley as a significant writer. Spark declares in the second paragraph of her introduction that Mary Shelley’s “notable association with [Percy] Shelley is apt to obscure the fact that in the twenty-eight years she survived him, she wrote continuously and developed her creative powers” (1). Spark both calls for and participates in a critical re-evaluation of Mary Shelley’s fiction, arguing that Frankenstein represents “the first of a new and fictional hybrid species” (128). By emphasizing Shelley as a figure of both critical and biographical interest, Spark laid the stage for what indeed became a reassessment of her work. This, it seems, could only be possible when the two strands, although indelibly linked, began to pull apart so that each could be viewed more clearly. In 1987, Spark published a significantly revised version of this work, retitled as simply Mary Shelley. This version is split into two distinct sections, one entitled “Biographical,” the other, “Critical,” thereby signalling and insisting on the distinction between the two approaches.
In the more than thirty years that elapsed between publication of Spark’s original and revised biography, interest in Mary Shelley had exploded. By the 1970s, feminist theory had become a significant tool for investigating literary texts, particularly those written by women. Many feminist critics of this era also “took pains to rediscover ‘lost’ women writers” (Hoeveler 45). Both these circumstances created conditions ripe for advancing Spark’s challenge of responding to Mary Shelley as a complex and compelling writer. Frankenstein, in particular, offered rich opportunities for theoretically informed reading. In 1976, Ellen Moers devoted a chapter of her book Literary Women, entitled “The Female Gothic,” to a discussion of Frankenstein. She argues that the novel benefits from “examination in light of the sex of its author” (92) because it is in her view “a birth myth” (92). This reading is necessarily biographical, tied to Mary Shelley’s complex relationships to the often permeable line between birth and death. She had lived her entire life under the shadow of the knowledge that her birth had caused the death of her mother. When she was writing Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, she was still in the aftermath of the trauma of giving birth to an illegitimate child and witnessing the death of that child only twelve days later (February 1815). For Moers, these events are key to seeing that “what Mary Shelley actually did in Frankenstein was to transform the standard Romantic matter of incest, infanticide and patricide into a phantasmagoria of the nursery” (99).
This fusion of feminist and biographical reading appeared in other critical works in short order. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published their book The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, developing a theory of female authorship linked to the assertion that “fundamental definitions of literary authority are . . . both overtly and covertly patriarchal” (45–46). They read Frankenstein as responding to Milton’s Paradise Lost and embedding both the more generalized anxiety experienced by all female authors writing within a patriarchal framework and a specific anxiety rooted in Mary Shelley’s biographical reality as an “orphaned literary heiress” (Gilbert & Gubar 222).
That same year, U. C. Knoepflmacher published a chapter entitled “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” which reads Mary Shelley’s first novel as “resurrect[ing] and rearrang[ing] an adolescent’s conflicting emotions about her relation both to the dead mother she idealized . . . and the father philosopher she admired and deeply resented” (91). This essay explicitly acknowledges a debt to Moers’ biographically inflected work, but shifts the focus from Mary Shelley’s experience of motherhood to her experience of childhood. Knoepflmacher’s influential essay was published in the collection The Endurance of ‘Frankenstein’: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. This book signals the rich variety of ways in which Mary Shelley’s novel could be read but also reveals itself as being one of the forerunners of a serious critical engagement with the text: the introduction expresses anxiety that the work will be met with “the same mixture of amusement and disbelief always shown by students toward a book assumed to contain nothing more than a story about an awkward and poorly sutured monster” (Levine & Knoepflmacher xii). The first essay in the collection, by George Levine, openly refers to Frankenstein as “a minor novel” (3). By choosing to present some of the ways in which Frankenstein might repay serious and sustained analysis, this collection helped to inaugurate a shift towards what was once a minor novel becoming one of the most widely taught novels on high school and college syllabi. It also laid the groundwork for Frankenstein to be interpreted by theoretical approaches ranging from deconstruction with the work of Barbara Johnson, postcolonialism with the writings of Gayatri Spivek, and queer studies with Eve Sedgewick’s reading of the homosocial bond between Victor and the creature in her book Between Men.
While interest in sophisticated and theoretically informed readings of Mary Shelley’s writing, or at least in one of her novels, grew, this also led to a revitalization of interest in primary sources pertaining to her life and writing. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Betty Bennett, was published in three volumes in 1980, 1983, and 1988, and The Journals of Mary Shelley, edited by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott Kilvert, appeared in 1987. The availability of these materials provided new insights into the realities of Mary Shelley’s life and acted as fodder for important critical biographies, such as Emily Sunstein’s 1989 Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. This interest in the life of Mary Shelley, alongside the perennial popularity of Frankenstein, led to a number of pop cultural adaptations. As Ramona Ralston and Sid Sondergard explore in “Biodepictions of Mary Shelley: The Romantic Woman Artist as Mother of Monsters,” the singularity of Frankenstein gave rise to a number of fictional representations of Mary Shelley that attempted to provide insights into her personality and character. Films such as Rowing with the Wind (1988), Gothic (1986), and Haunted Summer (1988) attempted to recreate the psychological and sexual tensions that may have been catalyzing the literary productivity of Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron during the summer of 1816. While often distorting the historical record and relying on lurid tropes of horror and dissipation, the fact that Mary Shelley and the myth of how Frankenstein was conceived could become the subject of major motion pictures testifies to how powerfully she had captured both scholarly and public imaginations.
Another impact of this primary material was its ability to amply demonstrate that Mary Shelley’s career extended beyond Frankenstein, encompassing not only five other novels, but a vast oeuvre of other writing, ranging across genres from essays, short fiction, biographies, and travel writing. Spark had noted as early as 1951 that Mary Shelley’s legacy included at least “two monuments to her own genius” (Child of Light 1), counting The Last Man alongside Frankenstein. Mary Poovey, in her 1984 work The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, made use of Mary Shelley’s broader career to argue for the pressures exerted by a need to produce orthodox texts aligned with normative social values. Anne Mellor, in both Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993) offered readings of a range of Shelley’s texts to explore her commitment to the bourgeois family unit and her particularly feminized approach to the radicalism often associated with Romantic writers.
Picking up on these themes, in 1993, the edited collection The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein appeared. Including essays devoted to Valperga, The Last Man, Shelley’s short stories, and her journals, one aim of this work was to showcase the range of writing Shelley had produced and how it, too, could profit from critical interpretation. The other was to reposition Mary Shelley as contributing to many of the questions and contexts that animated wider discussions of Romanticism. Another collection of essays, Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, appeared in 1997, commemorating the bicentenary of her birth and including criticism relating to the full range of her literary productions. Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner (2000) makes this emphasis on range and diversity explicit in its subtitle. This critical work has ensured that while Frankenstein remains undoubtedly Mary Shelley’s best-known work, it is no longer her only known work. The publication of an eight-volume set of all of Mary Shelley’s novels and a selection of her shorter works in 1995 has also made her wider corpus more readily accessible to readers. In 1997, a short story entitled Maurice, authored by Mary Shelley in 1820, was discovered. The excitement with which this discovery was greeted reflects an enthusiasm for Mary Shelley as a writer, but also an interest in understanding the scope of her work beyond Frankenstein.
The corpus of critical literature produced in the twenty-first century about Mary Shelley’s writing certainly attests to this. Studies of texts other than Frankenstein increasingly form a higher and higher percentage of the scholarly work produced about her, with The Last Man proving particularly appealing. The journal European Romantic Review devoted a special issue to articles about this novel in 2014. Articles on Lodore and Valperga have also served to situate Mary Shelley’s work within traditions of the nineteenth-century novel. While Mary Shelley has always been an author associated with the intersection of science and literature, the rise of ecocriticism and the theorization of impending environmental crisis has made her work seem especially prescient, with the recent publication of articles such as “The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” by Melissa Bailes and “Crusades against Frost: Frankenstein, Polar Ice, and Climate Change in 1818” by Siobhan Carroll.
Alongside a turn away from an exclusionary critical focus on Frankenstein, there have also been signs in recent critical work of an emerging wariness about the extent to which the biographical has informed understandings of Mary Shelley’s career. Graham Allen sees it as a critical trend in need of recovery, asserting in the introduction to the Critical Issues volume a refusal to revert to “the kinds of biographical modes of reading and interpretation which have so significantly marginalized women’s writing over the past two hundred years” (1). Lucy Morrison, in the introduction to the 2010 collection of essays, Mary Shelley: Her Circle and her Contemporaries, suggests that “the biographical legacy initially hindered the ways in which [her] literary impact was explored” (1). These suggestions by no means preclude an ongoing biographical interest in Mary Shelley. The year 2015 saw the publication of Charlotte Gordon’s comparative biography Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley, while Roseanne Motillo’s The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece (2013) speaks to the ongoing fascination with the story behind Frankenstein. However, a notion of critical self-awareness and even critical self-interrogation reflects the level of development that studies of Mary Shelley have reached.
This self-reflexivity, as well as the length of time that has elapsed since Mary Shelley was rediscovered as an object of critical interest, has also given rise to the possibility of a shift from the biographical to autobiographical. In 1980, Barbara Johnson published an essay on The Last Man, followed in 1982 by an influential article on Frankenstein entitled “My Monster/My Self.” Both these works made significant critical interventions to studies of Mary Shelley’s writing and to the deconstructive approach that Johnson adopted in her criticism. Barbara Johnson died in 2009, shortly after completing a book manuscript in which she returns to a focus on Mary Shelley. In 2014, this manuscript, as well as her earlier Shelley criticism was published along with afterwords by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman in a collection called A Life with Mary Shelley. In acknowledging that the study of Mary Shelley constitutes “a continuing thread in [Johnson’s] work… that continued to engage her thought throughout her life” (Carpenter xxv), the colleagues and friends who compiled this book reflect on how Mary Shelley, a writer for whom work and life have been, and remain, indubitably linked, can become a touchstone for both the personal and critical lives of others. They celebrate Johnson, for, like other scholars cited in this essay, “lifting … women writers out of obscurity and into those literary circles where still other students of women’s lives and literature could learn to know them” (Carpenter xxv).
This recent work offers a new perspective on the contentious history of reading Mary Shelley through a biographical lens by suggesting that lives and literature may best be reconciled when read alongside of one another. Mary Shelley lived a life that was dramatic and engaging and one that intersected in tantalizing ways with her literary work, especially Frankenstein. It should come as no surprise that both during her lifetime and afterwards, much of the interest directed towards her by scholars and critics has engaged with her biographical details. A recent turn towards more diverse methodologies and a growing interest in the full range of her work is welcome and stands to ensure that Mary Shelley will continue to be the subject of fruitful critical work. However, in wanting to understand the woman behind the legacy of Frankenstein and her other works, readers seek a deeper knowledge of those stories and sometimes of their own lives. The suggestion that the creation and the creator can only be fully understood together is, after all, part of Mary Shelley’s own legacy.
