FRANKENSTEIN

AMBITION, RESPONSIBILITY, AND THE MAKING OF MONSTERS

- By Shaleeka Jayalath

In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley sat by Lake Geneva alongside Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori to take part in a playful ghost-story competition among friends, little knowing she would ignite one of the most enduring works of English literature: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

By the time Mary Shelley was nineteen, the draft was complete. When the novel finally appeared in print in 1818, she was only twenty. Its author was young, untested, and more significantly, female in an era where women were rarely permitted to claim intellectual greatness.

This context matters. From around 1750 onwards, English women slowly began carving out space in the literary marketplace, yet writing for a living did not become socially or economically viable for women until the 1840s. Publication, recognition, and critical praise lay largely in the hands of men who could elevate a woman's writing to fame or condemn it to obscurity. That an eighteen-year-old woman produced a work so philosophically daring, so scientifically provocative, so psychologically unflinching, remains extraordinary. Shelley dared to imagine not just a ghost, but life itself created from death; not just terror, but moral collapse; not just a monster, but the monstrousness within humankind.