Frankenstein was published anonymously on 1 January 1818 when Mary Shelley was 20. The first edition was 500 copies. Shelley’s name did not appear as the novel’s author until 1823.

While Shelley began thinking about the story in the summer of 1816 (in response to Lord Byron’s famous challenge to write a ghost story), she wrote the first four chapters in the weeks following the suicide of her half-sister Fanny in October and had completed the novel by May 1817.