The story behind Frankenstein...

Recommended piece in Newsweek Their Love is Alive where the mystery of Mary Shelley then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin has a bit more light shed on it. One small part:

Few people did more to promote the archetype of the independent Romantic hero than Percy Shelley. It turns out, though, that he was a conscientious helpmate. By examining Mary's original drafts, Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson identified Percy's contributions to Frankenstein and, in 1996, edited a reproduction of Mary's notebooks for scholarly audiences. Now he has published The Original Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley). The first part of the new book highlights Percy's edits and the second reveals Mary's lone voice. "The novel was conceived and mainly written by Mary Shelley," Robinson writes in his introduction, but he estimates that Percy wrote "at least" 4,000 to 5,000 words of the 72,000 total. Many of -Percy's fixes are minor. Some are good, some bad. Percy may have corrected Mary's parallel constructions, but he also mucked up her more straightforward language. "Smallness" became "minuteness." "I did not despair" became "I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed." Frankenstein was already turgid; Percy made it more so.