ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein may be judged one of the most ‘neglected’ or, more precisely, most ‘overlooked’ of Percy Bysshe Shelley (PBS) texts, PBS2 having written over 4,000 of the novel’s 72,000 words. PBS contributed to Frankenstein should not surprise most students of the English Romantics, but the degree of his involvement will surprise many. PBS’s own last words about Frankenstein were voiced in the anonymous review that he wrote for his wife’s anonymously published novel. In the review, he insisted that Frankenstein dealt with ‘the working of passion out of passion’ and the ‘elementary feelings of the human mind’; with ‘domestic manners’; with ‘moral sensibility’; and with ‘original goodness’. The chapter attempts to offer new discoveries about or perspectives on Shelley’s contributions to the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein.
