is surprisingly prescient in its sense of the cultural impact her novel was to have.
Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the way both she and her husband represented
the work to its public. Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing the Preface to the original
edition of Frankenstein, distanced this novel from any attempt at "merely weaving
a series of supernatural terrors," insisting on its adherence to the higher aims of
the "imagination." Similarly, Mary Shelley, in writing the Introduction to the third
edition, stresses how in its initial conception her "imagination, unbidden, possessed
and guided" her. That all these statements are congruent with one another and with
an exalted notion of the Romantic imagination, however, cannot alter the ironic context
in which this particular phrase is uttered. In the previous paragraph we have been
observing Victor Frankenstein, who was once swept along by his imagination to create
a deformed and alienated being, revising with soberly rational care his account of
that act and its consequences. The actual context for this phrase in the novel would
thus appear to offset its perhaps expected paean to the imagination.