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This article discusses information sources and critical interpretations of Mary Shelley's life and her most important work, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. In addition to publishing history and information about revisions, translations, inclusion in collections, and references to possible sources of the story, it will evaluate some biographical material about Mary Shelley and her family, and their influence on her. Finally, various critical approaches, the growth of interest in both the writer and her work, and possible reasons for it will be noted.

David Punter and Glennis Byron note how the Gothic novel has been divided into two categories: the ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Gothic. Where the former emphasizes violence and ghosts, the latter focuses on female representation and the disavowal of the supernatural. The Hollywood Gothic films of the 1940s can be said to translate this aspect of the Female Gothic onto the cinema screen: Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) all feature narratives stressing the haunting nature of domestic spaces but there are no actual ghosts present. Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath (2000) breaks this convention. The film clearly draws on the Female Gothic lineage, situating Claire as a Gothic heroine, and yet there is an important difference: the supernatural is now an integral – and acknowledged – part of the story. This chapter explores this twenty-first century change, arguing that whilst the inclusion of the supernatural can be said to break with previous definitions of the Female Gothic, What Lies Beneath’s depiction of a ghost actually re-imagines and re-emphasizes the concerns at the centre of this tradition: the dramatization of marital and domestic experiences; an interrogation of feminine perception; and the reality of male violence against women.

To a certain extent the history of women's poetry in America is a tale of confinements,” writes Alicia Ostriker in the opening chapter of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. I would argue that it is less a tale of confinements than a tale still untold. Ostriker's own book on the topic, for instance, covers the entire period of women's poetry from 1650–1960 in a single chapter.