They Keep Coming Back!

Mary Shelleys mother (Mary Wollstonecraft, a famous writer in her own right) once tried to commit suicide by jumping in a river. She was saved, and resuscitated by the relatively new method (this is the 1790s) of artificial respiration.

Is this why Mary Shelley was obsessed with reanimating corpses? A decade after Frankenstein, Shelley wrote a story about a seventeenth-century Englishman who was frozen in ice for two centuries and then revivedRoger Dodsworth, the Reanimated Englishman,...