Mary Shelley Didn’t Invent the Gothic
Yesterday marked the 207th anniversary of the original publication of Mary Shelley’s immortal classic Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, which makes today a great time to both celebrate its legacy and clear up an apparently persistent misconception about the novel’s role in the development of the gothic as a genre.
For those who, like myself, are not great at math, 207 years means that Frankenstein was first published (anonymously) on January 1, 1818. It was famously conceived by then-18-year-old Shelley during a stay at the Villa Diodati, where Mary and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were visiting Lord Byron during the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, when the region was locked in a volcanic winter by the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora the year before.
It is not exaggeration to say that Shelley’s subsequent novel struck the worlds of imaginative and gothic fiction like the lightning bolt with which it is inextricably associated, and there are compelling arguments to suggest that Frankenstein was, for all intents and purposes, the first science fiction novel, published a decade before the birth of Jules Verne, and most of a century before Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or even the earliest novels of H. G. Wells.
On New Year’s Eve, I made a jokey (if not inaccurate) post about the horny underpinnings of the gothic genre, partly as a jab at some of the breathless reactions I’ve seen to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu from critics who really should know better. It became the first thing I’ve ever had go viral on Bluesky.
As with any viral post, it got a lot of responses. Some were people agreeing or signal boosting, some were people helpfully restating what I had just said, some were people clarifying or furthering the discussion, and more than a few were people adding some variation of “the gothic genre was created by a horny woman” – usually referring to Mary Shelley, sometimes by name, more often by implication.
Which is where that misconception I mentioned comes in. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be a pivotal work in the gothic canon, but it’s far from the first. By the time Shelley was born in 1797, the gothic novel was already going strong, and when Shelley wrote The Modern Prometheus, she was already consciously doing so in the shadow of a robust gothic tradition.
Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, which is widely considered the first gothic novel, in 1764, more than 30 years before Mary Shelley entered the scene. Like any genre or subgenre, the gothic did not emerge fully formed from nothing, and it has obvious forebears and precursors that make pinning down a patient zero difficult – but if there is one for the gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto is probably it.
(I am by no means a Walpole scholar, but I do know that he never married, and there has been considerable speculation as to his sexuality, with certain biographers describing him as asexual or “a natural celibate.” So, while the gothic genre may not have been “created by a horny woman,” it’s entirely possible that it was codified by a gay or ace man.)
By the time the second edition of The Castle of Otranto was issued in 1765, Walpole had addended the subtitle “A Gothic Story,” meaning that, though Otranto may have been what solidified the gothic into a genre, the building blocks were already familiar enough, even by then, that it could effectively be used as marketing terminology.
Between the publication of The Castle of Otranto and the 1818 release of Frankenstein, numerous other gothics, both classic and forgotten, swept in to fill what was a burgeoning demand. Books such as William Beckford’s Vathek and Mathew Lewis’ The Monk would likely have been at least familiar to Shelley by the time she wrote her magnum opus.
Indeed, if there is a woman (horny or otherwise) who has any claim to the title of inventor of the gothic, it would more likely be Ann Radcliffe, whose novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, fairly defined the genre during its boom period in the 1790s.
So popular was the form during that period that Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained, in 1797, that “I am almost weary of the Terrible,” describing a spate of books he had covered for the Critical Review in which “dungeons and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side & Caverns & Woods & extraordinary characters & all tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded on me – even to surfeiting.”
By the time Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the gothic had become so mainstream that it was now a subject of parody, as can be seen in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, released that same year.
Shelley’s novel may not have invented the form, therefore, but it was one of several works published early in the 19th century which helped to give it a new credibility, leading to a second boom in gothic novels and stories heading into the Victorian era.
I am no historian, and there are more knowledgable people than myself who have written at much greater length and far more insightfully on this subject. The history of the gothic and how it intersects with horror fiction and film more broadly are fascinating topics, and well worth study and exploration, for anyone who has an interest.
On the 207th anniversary of the publication of her most famous work, none of this is intended to diminish or detract from the vital and transformative influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Rather, it is a celebration of – and maybe a gateway to – not only her landmark contributions to the form but also a deeper exploration of the tradition in which she was working, and the ways in which she both explored and reshaped it for the future, and how relevant they still are, some two centuries later.
