Newcastle University

Literary outputs

Mary Shelley wrote in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:

Despite this, she was soon overshadowed by the literary career of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Anne K. Mellor describes an episode when a box containing Mary's writing was left in Paris when Jane Clairmont, Percy and Mary departed for Switzerland:


Her seven novels fall into the literary camps of Gothic novel (Frankenstein) and historical novel (The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck; Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca).

Often, readers interpret her work as autobiography - in The Last Man (1826), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron are fictionalised in the characters of Adrian and Lord Raymond although the disguises are thin: Adrian is motivated by philosophy and drowns when his boat sinks whilst Lord Raymond is motivated by passion and campaigns for the Greeks against the Turks, dying in Constantinople, just as Byron, who died two years before the publication of The Last Man, fought for Greek independence and died in Missolonghi. The novel therefore stands as a literary memorial to the Romantic circle which Mary had lost but she also used it as a vehicle to explore, and reject, some major Romantic ideals.

Although her work may be inspired by her life it cannot be dismissed as mere fictional re-workings of her friends and experiences; she explores gender relations, Enlightenment and Romantic ideals, contemporary politics and theological institutions. The intensity of Mary's sense of bereavement, following the deaths of three of her children and the drowning of her husband, contributed to the bleakness of The Last Man in which Mary offers what was then an original and disturbing vision of the destruction of humankind in the late Twenty-first Century. It begins with the unidentified narrator visiting Naples, in 1818, and discovering a manuscript written by Lionel Verney in 2079. The novel follows Verney from his humble beginnings to friendship with the heir apparent to the English throne, through a military campaign and ultimately, his becoming the last man on Earth. In his introduction to The Last Man (1965) Hugh Luke asserts that “By ending her story with the picture of the Earth's solitary inhabitant, [Mary Shelley] has brought nearly the whole weight of the novel to bear upon the idea that the condition of the individual being is essentially isolated and therefore ultimately tragic”.⁴²

She also penned countless short stories, particularly for annuals and gift books, such as The Keepsake. Critics have judged her short stories to be pedestrian but she saw writing for magazines as profitable. Advising Leigh Hunt to follow suit she wrote: “I write bad articles which help to make me miserable - but I am going to plunge into a novel, and hope that its clear water will wash off the dirt mud of the magazines” (9 February 1824).⁴³

In her short story, Transformation (1831), she returned to the macabre and supernatural. Transformation is the story of Guido who returns home to claim his sweetheart, Juliet. However, having squandered his wealth leading a hedonistic lifestyle abroad, Guido finds that Juliet's father, Torella, will not permit the union. He reacts with petulance, plots to abduct Juliet and, when his plan is discovered, is banished. Whilst plotting revenge, Guido witnesses a tempest, out of which storm emerges “a misshapen dwarf, with squinting eyes, distorted features, and body deformed, till it became a horror to behold”. Guido overcomes his revulsion to strike a bargain with the dwarf: he agrees to loan the dwarf his body for three days, in return for a sea-chest full of treasure:

Three days pass and the fiend fails to return, and all the while Guido's soul is 'caged' in the dwarf's body. Guido dreams that the fiend is wooing his beloved Juliet and (correctly) fearing that there is prophecy in his dream, returns to Genoa. A tussle with the dwarf in which both are stabbed, sees Guido live to inhabit his own body once again, and to reclaim his Juliet. The transformation teaches Guido to be a “fonder and more faithful husband” and he wonders if the fiend were in fact a good spirit “sent by my guardian angel, to show me the folly and misery of pride”.

Critically acclaimed in her own day, although she is not neglected, Mary is perhaps remembered today as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the author of Frankenstein (1818), her most enduring novel. The circumstances of the novel's genesis are well-known: Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, John Polidori, P.B. Shelley, and Mary Godwin (as she was then) passed a stormy night in Geneva, June 1816, inventing ghost stories. Mary's contribution, inspired by a dream, would be published two years later as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and marked the birth of the science fiction genre. Victor Frankenstein raids graveyards to acquire the parts he needs to create life but his experiment goes horribly wrong and he rejects his nameless creation. Denied companionship, the monster endeavours to destroy his maker. The novel explores themes which would characterise much of Mary Shelley's subsequent work, such as alienation and solitude; justice; the purpose of life; destiny; and social class as it relates to political power.