Mary Shelley’s original three-volume novel
Frankenstein was published quietly and anonymously in 1818 to little acclaim. The
Quarterly Review stonily observed: “Our taste and our judgment alike revolt at this kind of writing.... The author leaves us in doubt whether he is not as mad as his hero.” If they had guessed the author was in reality a young woman, only eighteen when she began her first draft, no doubt the critical chorus of disapproval would have been even more thunderous. It is astonishing that the book ever got written at all.
