a young girl
Age is always relative. Mary
Shelley was some two months shy of her
twentieth birthday when she began writing Frankenstein and well
past twenty-one when the novel appeared in print. Moreover, before she
began the novel toward the end of June 1816, she had registered
experiences highly unusual for a young woman in the constrained
environment of Britain, including eloping with a married man and twice
giving birth. That said, it is true that the author was in years yet an
adolescent when she wrote this novel and that, historically speaking, most
of its readers have been struck by a range of knowledge, maturity of
conception, and intellectual ambition unusual in one so young.
