ary Shelley is sometimes called the mother of science fiction for concocting the tale of a lab-made man who becomes a monster — but she may have had a real-life alchemist in mind when she created the character of Victor Frankenstein.
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously in London on New Year’s day, 1818, when Shelley was just 21. (Her name didn’t appear on the cover until a second edition was printed five years later.)
Critics with a psychoanalytical bent have read Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphorical figure drawn from Shelley’s tragic childhood and scandalous adolescence — for example, as the personification of her guilt over having an indirect hand in the deaths of two people: her own mother, who died in childbirth, and Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, who drowned herself after Shelley left her, pregnant and alone, to embark on a European tour with Mary.
