Today, Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, is 206 years old. She began writing it when she was just eighteen years old, and when she published it, she did so without her name attached to it. But why would she do that? Because the world at that time had certain expections when it came to women, especially those, like Shelley, who were mothers. And a book like Frankenstein did not meet those expectations. The fear of what could happen to her, should her name be revealed as the author of the book, was very real. There were consequences in those times for women who did not toe the line of what was deemed acceptable feminine behavior, to include losing custody of her children or finding herself spirited away to one institution or another.[1]”The Strange and Twisted Life of ‘Frankenstein.'” The New Yorker. February 12, 2018.
So her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, shopped the manuscript around, attributing it to “a friend.” Finally, it found a home with a willing publisher, who released it on this day in 1818 with a 500-copy run. It didn’t take long for reviews to begin to appear. Many reviewers initially believed that it was written by a man, many assuming the true author to be Shelley’s husband. It was noted that the inscription inside was an homage to William Godwin, a journalist and novelist… and Mary Shelley’s father. But another reviewer, while acknowleding this theory, disagreed, believing it to be the work of “less experienced writer,” perhaps the “daughter of a celebrated living novelist.”
That theory took hold, and the reviews began to reflect the disdain commonly held for women who stepped outside the realm of acceptable femininity. This quote from The British Critic, included in a review at the time, sums up the attitude towards the idea of a female author writing such content.[2]”Frankenstein and anonymous authorship in eighteenth-century Britain.” University of Minnesota Press Blog. January 18, 2019.
The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.
To dismiss a novel simply because it contained material deemed unacceptable for a “gentle” woman truly explains why she chose to publish anonymously.
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