When they hear the name "Shelley," most students and scholars of literature usually think of the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Students and scholars of those particular types of literature labeled in modern times as fantasy and science fiction, however, when they hear the name "Shelley," think not of the great Romantic poet but of his great wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. For it was she who gave readers the unforgettable characters of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation in one of the greatest of the Gothic novels and in what many science-fiction scholars, following the lead of Brian W. Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973), claim to be the first authentic science-fiction novel in history. Few literary works have had such a profound impact on the development of science fiction and horror and on Western thought in general.

That Shelley was able...