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On July 28, 1814, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin slipped furtively from her father's house in London to join Percy Bysshe Shelley who was waiting to elope with her to the continent. For Mary, who was not quite 17 at the time, it was the beginning of a new chapter in a storybook life. After a whirlwind courtship of secret meetings with Shelley at the grave of her mother, she was casting her lot with an impetuous iconoclast who had been expelled from Oxford, had recently left his pregnant wife and child, and had been angrily cut off by his father. Mary's father, William Godwin, was also furious at the runaway couple and refused to be reconciled. During their wanderings, their financial circumstances were precarious. Eventually, almost penniless, they returned to London where Mary gave birth, seven months after her elopement, to a premature baby.
The baby girl lived almost two weeks. Mary grieved her loss, but was soon pregnant again; less than a year after her first baby's death, she gave birth to a son. A few months later, she was shaken by the suicide of her sister Fanny and, following close, the suicide of Shelley's wife Harriet. Harriet's death left Percy and Mary free to marry. Within weeks after the marriage, 19-year-old Mary was pregnant with her third child. She was also completing a draft on her first book, Frankenstein.
The perennial success of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and the legion of movie and media adaptations of the book attest to something universally compelling in the story of the ambitious scientist and his loathsome creation. The book itself, in contrast to the more familiar adaptations, is an intriguing mixture of the naive and the sophisticated in which uncanny primitive fantasies are intricately interwoven with rhetorical philosophizing about the human predicament. Frankenstein is in the tradition of mankind's cherished myths—