For those of us who are into prose, Mary Shelley's our Romantic. After her death, Mary Shelley was remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley (there's patriarchy at work for you), now she's respected as a brilliant author in her own right. How could she not be, when she had the imagination to come up with Frankenstein and his monster?

Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)

Who doesn't know the name Frankenstein? The guy that created that scary creature—part human, part monster. The picture we have in our heads of the monster is very different from what Shelley described, which means you should go ahead and read the book to see what it's all about.

Chew on This

There's a lot of emotion—one of Romantic literature's big preoccupations—in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Even the monster in her novel is super sappy. Check him out talking about his emotions in these quotes from Frankenstein.

Rebellion is a big theme in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Take a look the monster rebelling against his creator and cursing him in this quotation from the novel (Quote #2).