Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was the daughter of atheist William Godwin, a philosopher whose Political Justice imagined human institutions perfected by reason, and deist Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary grew up in England’s most notorious freethinking household before eloping with the country’s most notorious atheist poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

During the famously wet summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva, Byron proposed that the assembled company each write a ghost story. The eighteen-year-old Mary produced something without precedent: a tale of the supernatural with no supernatural in it. Victor Frankenstein’s creature is not conjured by magic or damned by God. He is made, by science and ambition, and then abandoned by the man who made him.

The novel’s horror flows entirely from human choices and their consequences, which is one good reason to date the genre from it. The creature teaches himself language, reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, and puts to his maker the questions the biblical Job put to his own. Two centuries of stories about artificial minds, from Karel Čapek’s robots to Ex Machina, have been elaborations of the situation Mary Shelley set up, in which a creator is confronted by a creation he is unwilling to answer for.

Mary Shelley’s later, lesser-known novel The Last Man (1826) portrays humanity extinguished by a pandemic. The story is narrated by humanity’s last remaining survivor, and depicts English fiction’s first thoroughly secular apocalypse — an ending with no Revelation and no judgement. Versions of this story have been appearing ever since.