Young Mary Shelley by Esao Andrews
2018 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and although calling anything an “immortal creation” sounds like a cliché it seems uniquely apt in this case. Shelley tapped into something fundamental, fusing elements of the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus and John Milton’s early-modern epic Paradise Lost with 18th-century enlightenment thinking, 19th-century romantic poetry, and then-contemporary ideas about natural philosophy and scientific thought. Shelley wrote it on a dare, and what she thought was a ghost story became instead what some argue is one of the…