Gothic Tales

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Mary Shelley is most known for Frankenstein, but in the decades following the release of her magnum opus, she produced several novels, poems, short stories and other forms of writing. Collected here are ten of Shelley’s finest tales that, like Frankenstein, subvert the classist and misogynistic standards of patriarchal Victorian society and offer deep meditations on the nature of life and humanity. Shelley’s tales defy genre, ranging from romance and melodrama, to fairy tale and satire, to speculative and the Gothic, all mixed with biographical allusions to Shelley’s personal life. Faustian bargains, doppelgängers, time travel and hints of vampirism and witchcraft loom through these stories, and they are infused with Shelley’s tender emotionalism and conscious eye for the inequalities of her day. Shelley grounds the Gothic in the humane, leveraging hallmarks of the genre — anachronisms, false heroes, foreboding moods, and shadowy terrains — to show that the darkest monsters may be those already among us.

About Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.

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