Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus Annotated and Illustrated Edition

Book excerpt: The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a female writer ¬-- particularly if one was audacious enough to be a female novelist. Contemporary beliefs held that no one would be willing to read the work of a woman; the fantastic success of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein served to thoroughly disprove this theory.Frankenstein established Shelley as a woman of letters when such a thing was believed to be a contradiction in terms; only the reputation of Madame de Stael surpassed Shelley's in Europe. De Stael, however, was more famous for continuing to publish her works despite the fact that the Emperor Napoleon had explicitly forbade her to do so, rather than for the quality of the works themselves.