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When Mary Shelley initially conceived the plot of Frankenstein she was still only 18 years old, but she had already lost a child, a daughter who died just 2 weeks after she was born.
Not long after her baby died, Shelley wrote in her journal "Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold - and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived - I awake and find no baby - I think about the little thing all day".
The loss of her child induced acute depression in Shelley and evidence suggests that the grief over the loss as well as the death of her own mother when she was only 10 days old, may have been not only part of the inspiration for the novel, but also responsible for the novel's themes and preoccupation with ideas about abandonment death and reanimation.
The desire perhaps to revive her deceased daughter.
Mary's own biography as we shall see, teams with touchstone experiences of childbirth, motherhood, and mourning.
Like the scientist Victor Frankenstein who would bury himself in his experiments to deal with the grief over the death of his mother, Shelley would put all feelings aside and channel her energies into the writing of her first - novel "Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus".
In 1818, the year Shelley published Frankenstein, science was making huge advancements.
The study of electricity's effect on animal and human bodies or galvanism, had transfixed the nation, raising questions about the nature of life and death.
Knowledge of human anatomy was also progressing, through dissection and medical studies, as grave robbers up and down the country traded in dead bodies.
