The Reclaimed Family, by the Author of 'edwin and Mary'.

The story of a scientist who creates out of dead bodies a monster more powerful than himself-a monster that destroys its maker-Frankenstein should also be seen as a story about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman. After laboring for nine months ("winter, spring and summer passed away") to complete his experiment, whose aim is to discover the cause of "generation and life" and to bestow "animation upon lifeless matter," Victor Frankenstein flees in horror from his newborn creature. Reflecting the pregnancy anxieties of the nineteen-year-old, already thrice pregnant Mary Godwin, Frankenstein here embodies the author's own fears that she might not be able to love her child, especially if it were in some way abnormal, that she might be capable of desiring the extinction of her own offspring, and that her child might kill her, as she had inadvertently killed her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of a puerperal fever caused by her failure to expel the placenta. Shelley's novel then details what happens to a child abandoned at birth by its only parent: the creature seeks human companionship, but, repeatedly thwarted in his desire for a family, becomes vicious, burns the DeLacey cottage, and finally kills Frankenstein's brother, friend, bride, and the creator himself ...»