Little Monsters

Even as Jane Austen lay dying, having anonymously published only four novels (two more would be published posthumously), a teenage girl was expanding a story she’d written as a bet into a tale that would be retold, adapted, and immortalized on film more often than all of Austen’s works combined. For while the 30-something Jane Austen served up romantic critiques of the mores of the 18th and early 19th century British society, the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived the unnatural creation of life itself in Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

But what did that novel do for her personal life? What did it do when she miscarried, when her married lover was unfaithful, when her half-sister and husband’s wife killed themselves, when she and her new husband had to flee to Italy only to lose their two children there to sickness and death? What did the tale of an unholy monster wreak in her then?

There’s a reason this tale has not been told until now. Because Frankenstein wasn’t just a story she wrote. It was a plan.