"How did I, a young girl, come to think of so very hideous an idea?" This is the question Mary Shelley poses to the readers of her novel Frankenstein, and which this new study of Mary Shelley's Gothic horror story undertakes to answer. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein began life in 1816 as a ghoststory literally dreamed up for a competition between friends, and has endured to become a powerful myth of modernity. It is an exciting tale of scientific experimentation in the creation of artificial life and the sublime possibilities of the human intellect, but is also a cautionary tale about thedangers of obsession and the responsibilities of the heroic over-reacher. In its daring intellectual adventure, Frankenstein enters territory previously untouched by fiction. Mary Shelley draws ideas from the widely disparate sources of myth, alchemy, literature, natural philosophy and the newscience, combining these into a Gothic horror story. However, Frankenstein is a sensational Gothic novel which does not rely on the supernatural, but is rigorously rational. This study explores the contrasts between these themes, looking at Mary Shelley's challenge to the accepted conventions of hersociety, and her criticism of the high-flown Romanticism of her poet husband and his circle. Focussing on her innovative treatment of birth and education, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein links her interest in science with her position as a woman writer in the early nineteenth century. It also includes adiscussion of the subsequent history of Frankenstein and his Monster in popular culture.