The spark of life was only the beginning.

Whilst popular culture remembers the lightning flash and the stitched-together creature, Frankenstein remains one of the most searching meditations on science, loneliness, and what it means to be human. Remarkably, Mary Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote it.

From the icy wastes of the Arctic in Frankenstein to the uncanny resurrections and transformations of her shorter fiction, this online event celebrates the enduring imagination of the so-called “Mother of Science Fiction.” Professor Sharon Ruston explores the story of Frankenstein’s creature alongside Mary Shelley’s lesser-known tales.

She shows how stories such as On Ghosts, Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman, Valerius: The Reanimated Roman, and Transformation continue to reveal Shelley’s lifelong fascination with animation, identity, and the boundaries between life and death.

‘It was absolutely superb – very informative and delivered with authority.’ – visitor to previous online event.