Romantic Outlaws

She had moved from exploring the creative power of humankind—a favorite theme of Shelley and Byron—to plumbing the depths of human nature.

He would respect her right to work; she would respect his.

But later, when Mary too had suffered terrible losses, she grieved over the pain she had helped Shelley inflict on Harriet, whose plight as an abandoned wife in a judgmental age was a desperate one.

Mary scorned the idea that being “delicate” made a woman more attractive.

It created a generation of silly young women, unable to support their husbands in times of crisis, raise their children, or contribute to their communities.

She frequently referred to the book as her “offspring” or “progeny.”

Beauty and justice, like Keats’s beauty and truth, had fused in Shelley’s mind: the perfect human form achieved by Renaissance sculptors and the perfect government envisioned by Plato, Rousseau, or Locke shared the same source—they sprang from the human imagination.

In the distance against the sky, they could make out the towers of a picturesque castle named Frankenstein.

Fathers, though, seemed able to reject their children without even a backward glance. Or so it seemed to Mary in the fall of 1816 as day after day, Godwin maintained his flinty silence. She poured her sorrow and outrage into her novel by spelling out the consequences of Frankenstein’s rejection of his son. Like Mary, the creature has only a father,