It began as a game to pass the time while the rain fell and lightning struck. Visiting Switzerland in June 1816, a small group—young and rivalrous, amorous and ever so literary—agreed to a ghost-story-writing contest. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, could come up with nothing at first. Then she had a nightmare—a walking corpse, glimmering yellow eyes. The next day, she announced to the others—Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire—that she had imagined a story.

Two years later Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was published anonymously. Some guessed it was the poet Percy Shelley who had written the novel’s preface. Those who knew that the author was Percy’s (by then) wife, Mary Shelley, were amazed.

The question of whether Mary alone wrote the novel, however, would not die. The answer matters, and not only because scholars who once regarded Frankenstein as merely a potboiler now consider it a progenitor of science fiction, a monument of Romantic literature, and a landmark text in gender studies. The answer matters because Frankenstein so beautifully explores the consequences of living and working in isolation. After cloistering himself to bring dead flesh to life, Victor Frankenstein condemns his creature to loneliness. The creature does the same to him in revenge. Solitude makes monsters of both.

Few people did more to promote the archetype of the independent Romantic hero than Percy Shelley. It turns out, though, that he was a conscientious helpmate. By examining Mary’s original drafts, Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson identified Percy’s contributions to Frankenstein and, in 1996, edited a reproduction of Mary’s notebooks. Now he has published The Original Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley). The first part of the new book highlights Percy’s edits and the second reveals Mary’s lone voice. “The novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary Shelley,’’ Robinson writes in his introduction, but he estimates that Percy wrote “at least’’ 4,000 to 5,000 words of the 72,000 total. Many of Percy’s fixes are minor. Some are good, some bad. Percy may have corrected Mary’s parallel constructions, but he also mucked up her more straightforward language. ‘Smallness’ became ‘minuteness’. ‘I did not despair’ became ‘I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed’.

... contd.