There are moments in a person’s life when everything trembles.
Not out of fear — we all know fear — but because a point arrives where choosing becomes inevitable. And you don’t fix it by buying new shoes or telling your trusted hairdresser-advisor, “I want a new color, I want to feel different.” You simply wonder whether it’s better to keep pleasing others or take a step beyond, even when no one knows how it will turn out. Not even your trusted colorist, who is used to change.
But there is one of those tough, unforgettable figures who faced that moment early: Mary Shelley. She looked that moment straight in the eyes with the strength of someone who cannot yet imagine how immense the thing she carries inside will become. She is young: barely eighteen, a philosopher mother gone too soon, a father who teaches freedom, a love that is already a scandal.
Mary follows her scandalous love, Percy Shelley, living as she chooses — until life slowly begins to slip from her hands. And she is reborn, thanks to a “monster.”
Frankenstein begins to surface in Mary’s mind in the summer of 1816, in Lord Byron’s villa at Cologny, on Lake Geneva. A summer that wasn’t summer at all: the eruption of Mount Tambora had turned everything into a dark, rainy, almost unreal landscape — the kind of unreality that gives you chills just imagining Byron, Percy, and Mary Shelley together, an unrepeatable constellation, the perfect atmosphere for inventing something that would shake future generations and, above all, shake the author’s own insecurities. Frankenstein takes shape in Mary’s imagination, then takes life, begins to breathe and, once written on paper, frightens everyone with its truth. With its humanity, where humanity should not exist.
In the introduction to the second edition, Mary explains that the inspiration came after long discussions on galvanism and artificial life — and after Byron’s challenge to create a frightening story.
But from that night emerged a question, still alive today, still unresolved today, a question she embodied through her words:
What remains of the human when we try to recreate it?
The figure of Frankenstein becomes the echo of something we fear. The monster is life, responsibility, limits, and ambition all at once. He is the dizzying possibility of telling that story.
Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein with fury, curiosity, and urgency — everything that can no longer be contained comes bursting out. An urgency paired with doubt, of course: in the nineteenth century, a young woman was not supposed to imagine horrors, science, rebellion. And a woman who even loved science… certainly could not write a novel. Much less write one on her own. Heaven forbid!
(The nineteenth century always had very precise ideas about who should tell what.)
At first, her name doesn’t even appear on the book. Frankenstein is published anonymously in 1818, as if it were a sin to hide. Some even think Percy Shelley must be the author: more convenient, more logical, more reassuring.
But Mary doesn’t stop — or perhaps it is Frankenstein who refuses to stop, who wants her name. Who wants his creator beside him, on those pages. And the monster claims her, just as she reclaims herself.
When the moment comes to actually print the manuscript — London, 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — Mary makes the leap. She becomes, finally, its author.
Even though she wasn’t supposed to. Even with the great flaw of not being a man.
This is the gesture.
Simple, radical: saying, “this story exists, and I wrote it.”
Her passion and determination are visible even today, in contemporary interpretations — even in Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative one, much discussed — reminders that the intuition born on a night in 1816 continues to speak to our time.
But the magic of Frankenstein is also an image: the courage of a young woman holding a manuscript full of fear, questions, and unstable electricity, and bringing it to the printer. With the gentle firmness of someone who does not want to strike anyone, but wants to be present:
“This is my monster. I want him, and he wants me. And this is what I have to say.”
This is Mary Shelley.
And from that tiny and enormous gesture, a classic is born. A myth is born.
No, Frankenstein is not a monster — he is Mary Shelley’s creature.
And, in a way, he is also ours.
(And now we can go get our hair colored).