Whilst popular culture remembers the lightning flash and the stitched-together creature, Frankenstein remains one of the most searching meditations on science, loneliness, and what it means to be human. Remarkably, Mary Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote it.

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From the icy wastes of the Arctic in Frankenstein to the uncanny resurrections and transformations of her shorter fiction, this online event celebrates the enduring imagination of the so-called “Mother of Science Fiction.” Professor Sharon Ruston from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies explores the story of Frankenstein’s creature alongside Mary Shelley’s lesser-known tales.

She shows how stories such as On Ghosts, Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman, Valerius: The Reanimated Roman, and Transformation continue to reveal Shelley’s lifelong fascination with animation, identity, and the boundaries between life and death.