'The compositions published in Mrs. Shelley's lifetime afford but an
inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour of
this extraordinary woman.'

Thus wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his _Relics of Shelley_).
The words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm at that date.
Perhaps the present volume will make the reader more willing to
subscribe, or less inclined to demur.

Mary Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair share of
that nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes women of
letters. Her favourite pastime as a child, she herself testifies,
[Footnote: Preface to the 1831 edition of _Frankenstein_.] had been to
write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been--to use her own
characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting it--'the
following up trains of thought which had for their subject the
formation of a succession of imaginary incidents'. All readers of
Shelley's life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen--and a two
years' wife--she was present, 'a devout but nearly silent listener',
at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland
(June 1816), and how the pondering over 'German horrors', and a common
resolve to perpetrate ghost stories of their own, led her to imagine
that most unwomanly of all feminine romances, _Frankenstein._ The
paradoxical effort was paradoxically successful, and, as publishers'
lists aver to this day, Frankenstein's monster has turned out to be
the hardest-lived specimen of the 'raw-head-and-bloody-bones' school
of romantic tales. So much, no doubt, to the credit of Mary Shelley.
But more creditable, surely, is the fact that she was not tempted, as
'Monk' Lewis had been, to persevere in those lugubrious themes.