Episode 180: Mary Shelley: The Radical Mind That Made Frankenstein

Mary Shelley did not crawl out of the fog one night holding Frankenstein; rather she was born into a political and philosophical pressure cooker. Her mother wanted to tear gender roles out by the roots, her father thought government was a rigged scam, and her childhood house was full of banned books, radical houseguests, and casual corpse reanimation talk over dinner. Out of bad husbands, laudanum summers, and a “waking dream” of a creator who refuses to love his creation, she built the monster that became the blueprint for modern sci fi.

This episode walks into the real laboratory behind Frankenstein and asks who the true monsters are: the Creature, or the brilliant people who made him and walked away.