Beyond Frankenstein (Full Version)

Beyond Frankenstein gathers Mary Shelley’s lesser-known but hauntingly potent tales that extend the moral and imaginative terrain opened by her most famous novel. Here, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge does not merely animate bodies—it distorts time itself, warps intimacy, and exposes the fragile bargains by which human beings endure loss, desire, and regret.

The featured stories probe immortality and reanimation not as triumphant miracles but as existential punishments: a life lengthened beyond its natural span becomes a lens on jealousy, social suspicion, and the quiet devastation of watching love and community erode. Shelley’s clear, urgent prose turns speculative premises into psychological realism, asking what remains of identity when consequence outlasts intention. Together these works confirm her place as a major Romantic-era visionary whose gothic imagination is always in service of ethical inquiry and human feeling.

• Listeners who love Shelley’s Frankenstein and want her other classic explorations of science, fate, and moral consequence
• Fans of Gothic and Romantic literature drawn to atmospheric storytelling, yearning, and philosophical unease
• Readers interested in early speculative fiction where immortality and “reanimation” become psychological and ethical tests

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist of the Romantic period and the author of Frankenstein (1818), a foundational work of modern science fiction. The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, she moved in a circle that included Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married. Across novels, tales, and travel writing—such as The Last Man and numerous short stories—she examined ambition, loss, responsibility, and the costs of transgressive knowledge. Her work endures for its emotional intelligence, moral seriousness, and imaginative power.