Then, in 1822, Percy Shelley, whom Mary had married in 1816, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. Mary, who was not yet 25 at the time, would spend her 30 remaining years living modestly. Indeed, Mary’s greatest success would be Frankenstein, written when she was only 19 and conceived after a night of telling ghost stories in the Alps with Percy, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori. The resulting tale of an overly ambitious scientist and his monstrous creation has come to be known as one of the greatest horror stories ever written and continues to be relevant today because of the questions it raises about science’s dangerous potential.
The French Revolution. Part of the enduring importance of Frankenstein can be seen in the way it tapped into the concerns of its age, combining the central dualities of a culture in which reason and science were “displacing religion as centers of value” (Levine and Knoepflmacher in Crook, p. 59). The late eighteenth century (when the novel is set) and early nineteenth century (when it was written) were times of momentous change and upheaval in Europe; between 1770 and 1830 Europe’s link to its feudal past was severed, and the continent moved decisively into the modern age.
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