Sep 02 2024 50 mins
Frankenstein is English literature’s great myth about Artificial Intelligence, 200 years before A.I. existed.
But the world’s most famous monster is nothing like you imagine. Who knew that he chops wood and reads Milton’s Paradise Lost? And who remembers if Frankenstein is the name of the monster, or the mad inventor who made him? Sophie and Jonty explain how and why a brilliant scientist's breakthrough in creating artificial life ends in high drama and rare seabird-sightings in the Arctic circle.
Frankenstein’s own creator, the young Mary Shelley, was English literature’s first nepo-baby. She was the daughter of two celebrity intellectuals, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical William Godwin. At age 8, hiding behind the sofa in her parents' living room, Mary heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge read aloud The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley would become the Brad and Angelina of Regency England, entangled with Lord Byron's circle. Come for the insightful literary analysis – stay for the sex scandals and family dramas.
Content warning: references to emotional and physical violence, incest, mental illness and suicide.
Further Reading:
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Penguin Classics, 2018.
- Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation (Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, 2010).
- Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015)
- The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. Andrew Smith, (Cambridge UP, 2016)