The Seventeen Year-Old Who Invented Science Fiction

Summary

Book Riot – The Podcast

Episode: The Seventeen Year-Old Who Invented Science Fiction

Date: October 17, 2025
Hosts: Jeff O’Neal & Rebecca Schinsky

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Overview of the Episode

This engaging episode revisits a special "Annotated"-style segment exploring the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—its creation by a 17-year-old who not only birthed a literary monster but effectively invented the genre of science fiction. Set against the backdrop of an infamous summer gathering by Lake Geneva in 1816, the hosts tell the story of teenage Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), the scandalous personalities surrounding her, and the scientific obsessions that sparked the modern Prometheus.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Setting the Stage: The Year Without a Summer

• [02:12] The episode opens with atmospheric sound effects (rain, wolves) setting the scene for June 1816 on Lake Geneva.
• Context: A volcanic eruption caused a “year without summer,” forcing the group indoors and inspiring a legendary ghost story challenge.

The Cast at Lake Geneva

• [08:59] The five key figures:
  • Lord Byron: Notorious poet and heartthrob.
  • John Polidori: Byron’s doctor, later author of The Vampyre.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley: Aspiring poet, love interest of Mary.
  • Mary Godwin (Shelley): Daughter of famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, future author of Frankenstein.
  • Jane Claremont: Mary’s half-sister, famed for her beauty and machinations to orchestrate the gathering.
• Machinations and Affairs: Jane’s bold letters to Byron—"If I came around, could you keep it on the down low?" ([09:22] Rebecca)

Mary Shelley’s Influences and Heritage

• Mary’s reverence for her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft—“This is the most flattering thing anyone could say to me.” ([12:27], Mary, voice actor)
• Literary and Romantic Background:
  • Mary and Percy’s relationship flourished on shared ideals and ambition.
  • The Romantics’ quest for authentic, unfettered lives—"They schemed to run away together and read poetry and make love..." ([12:54] Jeff)

Science, Tragedy, and Inspiration

• Scientific Fads of the Day: Percy's fascination with electricity and “galvanism” (reanimation of dead tissue via electricity).
  • “What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands who knew how to wield it...” ([13:56] Jeff)
• Personal Darkness: Mary’s deep sense of loss (mother’s death in childbirth, her own child’s death) shapes her worldview.
  • "Dreamed that my little baby came to life again... I awake and find no baby. I think about that little thing all day." ([16:12], Mary, voice actor)
• The group’s ghost story readings (from Phantasmagoria) lead to Byron’s writing challenge.

The Birth of Frankenstein

• Mary’s Writer’s Block and Breakthrough:
  • “Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning. And each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” ([21:15], Mary, voice actor)
  • Her idea draws directly from dinner discussions on electricity and life: “Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated. Galvanism had given token to such things...” ([21:30], Mary, voice actor)
• The Moment of Inspiration:
  • “I placed my head on the pillow. I did not sleep. My imagination unbidden possessed and guided me... I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” ([21:47], Mary, voice actor)

Percy Shelley’s Crucial Support

• Percy’s encouragement turns Mary’s shivery vision into a full novel:
  • She gives him “carte blanche to make what alterations you will” in the drafts ([22:52], Mary, voice actor).
• Anonymity and Attribution:
  • The novel’s initial release was anonymous, leading many to suspect Percy was the author, but “the book is Mary’s.” ([23:06] Jeff)
• Creative Partnership: Their relationship is both romantic and intellectually collaborative.
  • “For eight years I communicated with unlimited freedom with one whose genius awakened and guided my thoughts...” ([23:44], Mary, voice actor)

The Legacy: Inventing Science Fiction

• Frankenstein’s narrative—mad science rather than ghosts—singlehandedly invents a new genre.
• “A new way to tell stories that didn’t rely on ghosts and magic, instead speculating on what science might actually make possible and what that might mean for humanity.” ([24:10] Rebecca)
• The genre’s legacy is “stories of science run amok”—from The Terminator to Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

Lasting Questions Raised by Shelley

• “What will we do if something we’ve made turns against us? What happens when what we create escapes our control?... The biggest question isn’t what if our efforts fail, but what if they succeed?” ([25:20] Jeff)
• “Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world…” ([25:43], Mary, voice actor)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Opening flourish: “It was, and this is true, a dark and stormy night. In fact, in the history of dark and stormy nights, this was one of the darkest and stormiest."
  — Jeff O’Neill ([02:12])
• “Dad’s not watching and I don’t have a boyfriend. If I came around, could you keep it on the down low?”
  — Rebecca, paraphrasing Jane Claremont ([09:33])
• “What I am learning here is that star-f***ing is a lot older than I thought.”
  — Jeff O’Neill ([11:46])
• “I busied myself to think of a story, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror. One to make readers dread to look around, curdle the blood and quicken the beating of the heart.”
  — Mary Shelley (voice actor) ([20:55])
• “Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, and Percy’s known interest in the subject and the prominence of his name caused some to speculate that he in fact wrote the novel. And while his fingerprints are there, the book is Mary’s.”
  — Jeff O’Neill ([23:06])
• “So why has it endured? Some of it is the elegant simplicity of the setup: mad scientist brings dead to life, what happens next?”
  — Rebecca Schinsky ([24:10])
• “She was the first to capture the evolving world in literature, changing the fantastical ‘what if’ questions of Gothic horror novels into a more scientifically grounded ‘what now?’”
  — Rebecca Schinsky ([24:58])
• “Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world...”
  — Mary Shelley (voice actor) ([25:43])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:12] – Setting the gothic stage of Lake Geneva, 1816
• [08:59] – Introduction of the cast and their relationships
• [12:27] – Mary’s connection to her mother, Wollstonecraft
• [13:56] – The scientific obsessions (galvanism, electricity)
• [16:12] – Mary’s personal loss and darkness: “I awake and find no baby...”
• [16:57] – Reading Phantasmagoria and launching the story contest
• [20:55] – Mary struggles to write, finds her spark
• [21:47] – The famous waking ‘dream’ of Victor Frankenstein
• [22:52] – Percy's pivotal editorial and emotional support
• [23:44] – The depth of Percy and Mary’s creative partnership
• [24:10] – The birth of science fiction as a genre
• [25:43] – Iconic warning about “mocking the stupendous mechanism of the creator”

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Conclusion

This episode is both a dramatic retelling and insightful analysis of how a teenage Mary Shelley, surrounded by notorious poets and inspired by both personal pain and scientific advances, wrote Frankenstein. The Book Riot team highlights how Shelley transformed the “what if?” of ghost stories into the speculative “what now?” of science fiction, a genre she essentially invented, and how her creation and its anxieties about creation remain ever-relevant.

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Further Reading:

• Miranda Seymour’s Mary Shelley biography
• Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley

For more, check out the show notes and recommendations in the episode.

Transcript

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This episode is brought to you by Marshalls, where you never have to compromise between quality and price. The buyers of Marshalls hustle hard working to bring you great deals on brand name and designer pieces because Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff. Visit a Marshalls store near you or shop [e-mail] when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Bringing something out from the vault today, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is in the news, coming out soon. People are talking about Frankenstein, so we thought we'd bring out of the Vault this episode we did for Annotate dearly departed, much loved show. We did a while ago a little more in the NPR style, but this one we did on Frankenstein. We had some of our friends and co workers narrate some of the pieces for us and do some of the voices. The episode is called the 17 year old who Invented Science Fiction about Mary Shelley and how she came up with Frankenstein and the influences and the night in question that made it. Hope you enjoy that. Thanks for listening to the show and have a great weekend. Here we go. I think for this one we should set the stage a little.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think you're right. How about we start with a solid driving rain?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, that's nice. Now how about a little whistling wind.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Huh? What do you think next? Like a clattering gate or a shutter or something?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know. Let's see what Kyle can give us.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Ooh, howling wolf. Nice touch. This is a little too fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, can I say it or do you want to?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, come on, don't tease the people. I see right here in the script you get to say it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I've always wanted to say this. It was, and this is true, a dark and stormy night. In fact, in the history of dark and stormy nights, this was one of the darkest and stormiest.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's June 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. A few months earlier, a giant volcano eruption in the Pacific had blown an enormous cloud of dirt into the air that affected weather around the globe. In Europe, 1816 would become known as the year without summer.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It made what should have been a mild and pleasant stay for five visiting English folk, a blustery and unseasonably foul June.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A particularly bad stretch led them to come up with some alternative entertainment. One now familiar to modern campers telling ghost stories. But these weren't the ghost stories we know now of hitchhikers and chainsaw wielding loners. These were German ghost stories, collected and published for the song the sole purpose of scaring the pants off educated, Capital R Romantics.

[Jeff O'Neill]

After a few nights of reading stories, one of the five suggests a new pastime. Let's all try our hand at writing one. And over the next few days, that's what they did.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

One of the stories would later be published as the Vampire, spelled with a y by one Dr. Polidori. It would be the most famous and influential vampire story until Bram Stoker tried his hand.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Amazingly, though, the Vampire was only the second most famous story to come out of this rainy day exercise. The champion would be the story of a fringe medical doctor who got the terrifying idea to put together parts of human corpses and see what happens if you zap them with electricity.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley appeared to its author in a flash by the stormy shores of Lake Geneva. At the time, though, her name was Mary Godwin, a saint 17 year old woman who'd never before written a novel, who had joined the party for an illicit rendezvous with one of the most famous poets of the day, Percy Shelley. And in imagining the story of a scientist bent on creating life, she herself gave birth to a brand new genre of literature we now call science fiction. Hello and welcome to Annotated. I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I'm Jeff o'.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

In this episode, the story of how the rebellious daughter of the first feminist created a monster that would become mythic and wrote the first classic work of a new genre.

[Jeff O'Neill]

To help us tell the story, we've enlisted some folks to read from the journals and letters of those involved. It's the story of scandalous affairs, tragic deaths, real life, mad scientists, and the 19th century version of a booty call.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

The five participants in this the most famous storytelling game of all time each had a role to play in the genesis of Frankenstein. The most famous was Lord Byron, a poet of such fame and infamy for both his artistic and amorous exploits that people would crowd outside in the hopes of getting a glimpse of him. Number two of five was Byron's personal doctor, John Polidori, recently the valedictorian of his medical school class.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The rest of the entourage included Percy Shelley, the up and coming poet in his own right, who Byron wanted to meet, and of course his mistress, Mary Godwin, who would soon become Mary Shelley, once Percy's first wife was out of.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The picture and last but not least, Mary Godwin's half sister, Jane Claremont. Though Jane was the least prominent of the five, the group found themselves together at Lake Geneva because of her. Jane was a renowned beauty with no particularly attractive prospects. Perhaps as a last sally against an unappealing future, she wrote what can only be described as a series of saucy fan letters to Lord Byron in the hopes of starting up some sort of an affair, this one laid it out as plain as could be ventured. If a woman whose reputation had yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you these many years, if she should secure you secrecy and safety, could you betray her? Or would you be silent as the grave? Dad's not watching and I don't have a boyfriend. If I came around, could you keep it on the down low?

[Jeff O'Neill]

And Byron, being Byron, was game to get up to lil somethin somethin, though on distinctly Byronian terms. As he would say later, I never loved her, nor pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of 18 comes prancing to you at all hours There is but one way. So while Jane was beautiful and more than willing, her beauty alone couldn't seal the deal. He had his pick of women from every rank and country in Europe. But what Jane had that Byron's other pursuers didn't was a connection to Percy Shelley.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Shelley had made a name for himself as the English poet to watch in just a few short years, and Byron wanted to know him. And Shelley had been eyeing Jane's half sister, Mary, who herself was looking to get out of her father's house and out from under her stepmother's foot.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So Jane, God love her, concocts a three way rendezvous. If Mary comes with her, she will get to be with Percy. And if Percy comes, then Byron will join them and then she will get some, shall we say, quality time with the most infamous lover on the continent.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Both Byron and Mary were willing to travel across Europe to get to know Percy better. And why was he himself interested in Mary? Partly because because of who her parents were. Percy idolized both Mary's father, William Godwin, a renowned political philosopher, sometimes called the father of anarchism, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women and sometimes called the first feminist.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What I am learning here is that star f ing is a lot older than I thought.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This all leads us back to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein's soon to be teen mom. Before this fateful party game, Mary was not an author in her own right, but she did have serious reverence for one, namely her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft died from complications giving birth to Mary, and her shadow loomed large, especially early in Mary's life.

[Jeff O'Neill]

One scene sums it up pretty nicely. The young Mary, around 10 or 11, would go to the cemetery and sit by her mother's grave and read her works. She was so intimately knowledgeable of her mother's writing in life that to be compared favorably with her was the highest compliment.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Mrs. K says that I am grown very much like my mother. This is the most flattering thing anyone could say to me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Wollstonecraft was already a legend, one that Percy Shelley revered almost as much as Mary did. Both Mary and Percy were deeply influenced by Wollstonecraft's call to live lives unfettered by society's demands. So when Percy had a chance to meet the daughter of the most influential woman of her age, he took it. And the young woman he discovered blew him away. Here's Percy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I do not think there is an excellence at which human nature can arrive that she does not indisputably possess. How deeply did I feel my inferiority, how willingly do I confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation and magnificence of the intellectual nature. Their relationship happened fast and it was passionate. They schemed to run away together and read poetry and make love and in general live the life that the Romantics dreamed of.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

When Mary openly professed her love to Percy, it was of course, at a visit to her mother's grave site.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Shortly thereafter, Mary, Percy and Jane traveled to Lake Geneva to meet Byron. It was on this trip that Percy began to influence Mary's sense of her own literary potential and also a possible topic, scientific experimentation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

As a student at Oxford, Percy's rooms looked like a chemistry lab crossed with a gentleman's library. He was a nut for science, particularly the then fringe topics of human anatomy, biochemistry and the just being figured out force of electricity.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands who knew how to wield it, in what manner to direct its omnipotent energies and command an indefinite quality of the fluid. Percy's characterization of electricity as fluid captures the best understanding of his day. Forty years after Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning itself was electricity, an anatomist and physicist named Luigi Galvini showed that somehow electricity was involved in the nervous system of animals. By stringing up frogs on kites and watching them twitch after being struck by lightning.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Conjecture and theories about electricity's connection to life excited Shelley, and Mary got an earful of anything Shelley was excited about. It's easy to see then how the strange weather they experienced that summer in the Alps got Mary's narrative juices flowing.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

The thunders that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before. We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Basically, her time that summer was spent listening to Byron and Shelley blab about stuff they were interested in while it rained. A few days of that and you'd dream about creating a monster that would kill everybody.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Too many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of those, various philosophical doctrines were discussed and among others, the nature of the principle of life and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This discovery and communication of the principle of life probably refers to not only Galvini's experiments with frogs, but also the even more audacious and and frankly bizarre attempts by Giovanni Aldini to revive human corpses by hooking them up to a primitive battery and just seeing what happened.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Not much did happen, but a slight flap of the eyelids and the twitch of the arm got the scientifically minded of Europe yapping. Even a couple of poets on vacation with their mistresses. Both Byron and Shelley were excited by these new possibilities and saw them as further evidence that man was ready to finally master himself and nature.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Mary, though, wasn't so sure that everything was just going to work out. Her mother had died in childbirth and she herself had already lost a young child. But she definitely saw the allure of reanimation, as it was called, and even dreamed about it.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Dreamed that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cooled and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived. I awake and find no baby. I think about that little thing all day.

[Jeff O'Neill]

If Mary was a little darker than her fellow storytellers that June, well, spending time reading your mom's books on her grave and being unable to shake the memory of a dead baby will do that to a person.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Luckily, darkness would be the order of the day for their story competition, so she had an edge over her sunnier counterparts. Apparently, even two notorious windbags like Byron and Shelley got tired of hearing themselves talk. So the group turned to a collection of German ghost stories that Byron had brought along in his specially designed carriage built to function as a traveling library.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The book was called Phantasmagoria and in it were eight stories with titles like Death's Head, Death's Bride, the Fated Hour and the Black Chamber. Basically, these were stories about spirits and ghosts and possessions and dark secrets meant to evoke that strange combination of fright and pleasure that can be so thrilling. The closest modern equivalent would be a typical horror movie that has some sort of vaguely supernatural element like the Ring or Final Destination. Anyway, after they had burned through those stories, Byron turns to the group with an idea. We will each write our own ghost story.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

It must have been an exciting moment for Mary. Here she is, the daughter of a great writer being asked by the most famous writer of his day to enter into a friendly little writing competition that, oh by the way, includes this dreamboat you're trying to save Steal away from his wife.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

I busied myself to think of a story, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror. One to make readers dread to look around, curdle the blood and quicken the beating of the heart.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Here she is with this great chance to show off what she can do, and of course she ends up with a pretty good case of writer's block.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning. And each morning I was forced to to reply with a mortifying negative.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And so, in frantically casting about for ideas, she decides to build off all the talk about electricity and how it seemed to be tangled up with how humans operate.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated. Galvanism had given token to such things. Perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and imbued with vital warmth.

[Jeff O'Neill]

With this spark of an idea. She would later write that her attention, unconscious, did the rest.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

I placed my head on the pillow. I did not sleep. My imagination unbidden possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that around in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, at the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Mary almost immediately told her idea to Shelley, who, along with Byron, had already given up on his own entry in the concept contest. He encouraged her to expand it from a short story into a book. Percy's support of her was unflagging during the long process that brought Frankenstein to print in 1818, including being intimately involved in her drafting and editing process.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

I sent you, my dearest, another proof which arrived tonight. In looking it over, there appeared to me some abruptness which I have endeavored to supply. But I am tired and not very clear headed, so I give you carte blanche to make what alterations you will.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, and Percy's known interest in the subject and the prominence of his name caused some to speculate that he in fact wrote the novel. And while his fingerprints are there, the book is Mary's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Considering all the pieces that came together to get Mary to lay her head down and dream of Victor Frankenstein, it's not that surprising that she had the idea. But without Percy guiding her through the process of editing and using his connections to secure a publisher, and frankly believing in her abilities, it's quite likely that the world would never have Frankenstein. It was a creative mentorship, romance that would last until his untimely death, and in Mary's later description, could be the stuff of romantic poetry.

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

For eight years I communicated with unlimited freedom with one whose genius awakened and guided my thoughts. I conversed with him, obtained new lights from him, and my mind was satisfied.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's odd to think that all the bold faced names associated with the Lake Geneva group, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, would ultimately be eclipsed by the name Frankenstein. So why has it endured?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Some of it is the elegant simplicity of the setup. Mad scientist brings dead to life what happens next? But what's been more influential than this particular story is the entire genre that Mary Shelley created when she wrote Frankenstein. With one foot in horror and one in modern science, Shelley, for all intents and purposes, invented science fiction. A new way to tell stories that didn't rely on ghosts and magic, instead speculating on what science might actually make possible and what that might mean for humanity.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The scientific revolution that had been chugging along in Europe was finally descending from the heavens in astronomy to the more human scales of chemistry and biology. Medicine as a scientific discipline was in its infancy. I mean, it was only in 1772, barely 20 years before Mary was born, that science figured out that oxygen was even a thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And so 17 year old Mary Shelley is the right woman at the right time. A half romantic, half realist who created a half man, half monster during a dark and stormy summer in Lake Geneva. She was the first to capture the evolving world in literature, changing the fantastical what if questions of Gothic horror novels into a more scientifically grounded what now?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Today, stories of signs run amoks around us. The Terminator Minori Report, Margaret Atwood's Madadam trilogy. And they can all be traced to Mary Shelley's questions. What will we do if something we've made turns against us? What happens when what we create escapes our control? And she realized that the biggest question isn't what if our efforts fail, but what if they succeed?

[Mary Shelley (voice actor)]

Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist. He would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror stricken.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This episode of Annotated was written by me, Jeff o' Neill and directed by Jeremy Desmond.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Sound editing and design by Kyle o'. Neill. Our thanks to Mahesh Murad for being our Mary Shelley. Bob Shinsky for being our Lord Byron, Amanda Nelson for being our Jane Claremont, and Kyle o' Neill for taking on the role of Percy Shelley.

[Jeff O'Neill]

If you want to find out more about Shelley and Frankenstein, I highly recommend Miranda Seymour's authoritative biography, mary Shelley. For additional reading recommendations, please check out the show notes. And if you haven't read Frankenstein itself, I think you are in for a surprise. It's not the book you think it is. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios. New Film Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere Starring Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strahm. Scott Cooper, the director of the Academy Award winning movie Crazy Heart, brings you the story of the most pivotal chapter in the life of an icon. Springsteen 16 Deliver Me From Nowhere only in theaters October 24th. Get your tickets now.