Where to Start with Mary Shelley: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Mary Shelley — whether to begin with Frankenstein, The Last Man, or Mathilda. A complete reading guide to the inventor of science fiction.
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the English novelist who at eighteen wrote Frankenstein (1818) during a ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, publishing it anonymously at twenty-one. The novel invented science fiction as a literary genre, created one of the most enduring figures in all of fiction, and asked philosophical questions about creation, responsibility, and consciousness that two centuries of subsequent literature, science, and technology have not exhausted. Shelley was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her), the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the mother of four children, three of whom died before her; her life was defined by exceptional intellectual inheritance and exceptional personal loss, both of which find expression in her fiction.
Where to Start: Frankenstein (1818)
The essential Shelley — and one of the most important novels ever written. Victor Frankenstein is a student of natural philosophy who discovers the secret of life and, in a moment of hubris and obsession, creates a human being from assembled corpse parts and galvanic electricity. He succeeds. He then flees in terror from what he has made.
The Creature — never named — is left alone in the world, beautiful to himself and horrifying to every human who sees him. He teaches himself to read; he reads Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch; he watches a family from hiding for months, learning language and social feeling without ever daring to approach them. When he finally does approach them, they flee in horror. He finds his creator’s journal. He understands what he is.
What distinguishes the novel from its popular adaptations is the Creature’s extraordinary articulateness. In the novel’s heart — a long embedded narrative in which the Creature tells Frankenstein what his life has been — he argues his case with a philosophical precision that makes him the most sympathetic figure in the book. His fundamental question — you made me without my consent; you owe me something; why will you give me nothing? — is unanswerable by any moral framework Frankenstein can apply.
The 1818 first edition, written at eighteen, is rawer and in some ways stronger than the 1831 revision Shelley made as a more mature author; the Penguin Classics edition of the 1818 text is generally recommended.
The Last Man (1826)
Shelley’s most ambitious novel — a pandemic apocalypse set in a republican twenty-first century England. Written in grief for Percy Shelley, Byron, and the idealism of the Romantic generation, it is one of the earliest and most devastating works of apocalyptic fiction. Visionary, deeply felt, and far more readable than its obscurity suggests.
Mathilda (1819)
A short Gothic novella — suppressed by Shelley’s father and unpublished until 1959 — about a young woman destroyed by her father’s incestuous obsession. Autobiographically raw and psychologically precise; one of the most honest works in the Gothic tradition.
Reading Mary Shelley
Begin with Frankenstein — it is incomparably her greatest achievement. Read The Last Man for her most ambitious secondary work. Mathilda is the most personal of her shorter pieces. All three are standalone.
For the full Mary Shelley bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Mary Shelley author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Mary Shelley?
Frankenstein (1818) is the only starting point — written when Shelley was eighteen and published anonymously, it invented science fiction as a literary genre and remains the most philosophically profound horror novel ever written. Victor Frankenstein's creation of life from dead matter, and his immediate abandonment of the creature he made, generates questions about creation, responsibility, and what it means to be human that are still being answered by AI ethics researchers two centuries later. Nothing else Shelley wrote approaches its achievement.
What is Frankenstein actually about?
Frankenstein is often summarised as a horror story about a monster, but the Creature is the novel's moral centre, not its villain. Victor Frankenstein creates a being of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence and then flees in horror from his own creation. The Creature, abandoned and rejected by everyone who sees him, asks — in articulate, philosophically sophisticated terms — why his creator brought him into existence only to refuse him the companionship that makes existence bearable. The novel is about the ethics of creation and the cruelty of abandonment; the Creature is the most sympathetic figure in the book.
What is The Last Man about?
The Last Man (1826) is Shelley's most ambitious and most underrated novel — set in a twenty-first century England as a plague sweeps across the world, killing humanity country by country, until Lionel Verney walks the earth alone. Written after the deaths of her husband Percy and most of her close circle, the novel is a sustained elegy for humanity and for a specific generation of Romantic idealists that reads with extraordinary prescience. One of the earliest pandemic novels and a visionary work of apocalyptic fiction.
Is Frankenstein worth reading today?
Frankenstein is more urgent today than at any point since its publication. Shelley's questions — what are the responsibilities of creators toward what they create? What happens to a being made intelligent and then abandoned? What makes us human? — are precisely the questions being asked about artificial intelligence. The novel also works as Gothic horror and as an adventure story; its frame narrative (the Creature's account of its own suffering) is genuinely moving. The 1818 first edition (available in Penguin Classics) is generally preferred to the 1831 revision.
