Artwork by Elliot Balson
Frankenstein
Lord Byron proposed a horror story contest to pass the rainy days at the Villa Diodati. While struggling to come up with a compelling plot, Mary Godwin (later Shelley) experienced a vivid nightmare in which she envisioned a pale student kneeling beside a man he had just brought to life. Over the ensuring months she turned the vision into a full-length novel. Frankenstein was finally published, anonymously, on 1 January 1818. Popular stage adaptations and translated followed. Shelley published a significantly revised third edition under her own name in 1831. This edition included a famous introduction in which she recounted the ghost story contest in Geneva, as well as the inspiration she found in Dundee.
Other works
Mary Shelley’s vast output spans novels, short stories, poems, plays, travelogues, and biographies. After Frankenstein she produced a plague-ridden dystopian novel set in the late 21st century, The Last Man (1826), the historical epics Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), and the late novels Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837).
Arguably her most scandalous piece of writing, Mathilda (written in 1819), was suppressed by her father until it eventually saw print in 1959. Alongside her fiction, Shelley wrote the travel narrative Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), crafted numerous biographical essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and diligently edited and promoted the poetry of her late husband.
Two of Shelley’s short stories ‘Transformation’ (1831) and ‘The Mortal Immortal’ (1833) have been adapted into comics as part of the University of Dundee’s Mary Shelley’s Dundee project.
Artwork by Katy Stone