or, the modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley was only eighteen when she began to write Frankenstein. She eloped to the continent in July 1814 with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1816, now married, they spent the summer with Lord Byron near Geneva, during which time she began to write her novel which came about as the three-some amused themselves by reading and writing ghost stories. Her story of Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy, who tries to impart life to a creature constructed from collected bones, is not a study of the macabre as such, but rather a study of how man uses his power through science to manipulate and pervert his own destiny.
