suicidal father from drowning himself. When her own husband disappeared at sea some years later, she found herself following in Matilda’ s footsteps, convinced the whims of her imagination had become a reality:“[ We were ] driving( like Matilda), towards the sea to learn if we were to be for ever doomed to misery.”
Matilda, and Shelley after her, would both arrive too late to save the men they loved. Acknowledging outright the extent of her fate’ s connection to her writing, and her own accidental prophecy of loss at the cold hands of the ocean, Shelley later wrote in her journal:“ Matilda foretells even many small circumstances most truly-- and the whole of it is a monument of what now is.”
But now we come to what is perhaps the greatest blend of fact and fiction that Shelley would put to paper; her most powerful of predictions that would sadly come to pass. With Frankenstein, she formed a prophecy of an insatiable hunger for power and a dwindling store of empathy. It was a forecast that would play out across no less than two centuries, lasting right up until the present day; one that would reach far beyond her own life to encompass the fate and sensibilities of mankind as a whole.
Several factors inspired elements of what would become her magnum opus, from feelings of displacement as a child, to being turned away by her own father in adolescence. Chief amongst them, however, was a morbid fascination with life, death and the grey area in between. This was sparked in part by conversations with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and John William Polidori regarding genuine scientific efforts taking place at the time to reanimate the dead through use of electricity. Living in an era when our understanding of science was coming on leaps and bounds at a rate difficult to keep up with, man’ s apparent desire to conquer death fuelled both nightmares and creativity in the mind of a then just 18-year-old Mary Shelley. The idea took hold, and throughout the nine-month period that followed, she wrote Frankenstein. The irony of its creation mirroring the length of the human gestation period was not lost on Shelley either. She often referred to the novel as her‘ offspring’ or‘ progeny’, and it would go on to have a life of its own, superseding the control of its creator. This is, of course, a major theme found within the book itself, and yet another ironic example of the muddied distinction between Shelley’ s life and work.
The story of Frankenstein has many layers of discernible meaning, hence its enduring popularity amongst both casual readers and the most hardened of literary critics. It’ s not often a book remains in print for 200 years, after all. At its heart, however, it is a cautionary tale about the dangers of pushing science too far; a direction in which its young author feared, even all those years ago, we were already heading. In turn, it warns us against the horrors that could follow should mankind continue to pursue autonomy over nature and a depth of knowledge greater than we are psychologically or emotionally equipped to cope with:“… how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
Most telling of all, Shelley prudently foresaw the reception that awaited her most famous creation. It’ s no surprise that modern adaptations of Frankenstein on the stage and screen increasingly portray the eponymous doctor’ s creature as nought but a brainless,
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