More on the case for the 1818 text

 

More on the case for the 1818 text:

• The 1818 text is closest to Mary Shelley's original conception, formed immediately after her dream of July 1816 there is considerable interest in a novel written by this author, given her parentage and family history, when she was barely twenty
• it was composed while she was either living with, or still in close contact with, the small group of people who first planned to write a series of ghost stories
• certain features of the novel, such as the debate about the principle of life, are the outcome of discussions at the Villa Deodati in the summer of 1816
  the novel was completed in highly dramatic personal circumstances, which may have affected both the style and the plot
• the 1818 version was the one first read and reviewed by Mary Shelley's contemporaries, and was the text on which the novel's popularity and notoriety were first based
• Mary Shelley's reasons for wishing to revise the novel in 1831 can never be completely understood, but her decision certainly arose largely from her experience of life after its publication in 1818 and led to her to create what most scholars and critics agree is an entirely different novel.

 

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