Although Mary Shelley surely exaggerates the time it took her to begin her novel as
well as the anxious writer's block that inhibited her starting forth, there is a more
serious aspect to this account than her personal uncertainties. Questions concerning
the circumstances of and responsibility for creativity, the attitude with which intellectual
ambition approaches the unknown, and the moral neutrality of the human imagination,
are deeply inlaid within the structure of Frankenstein. There is thus a sense in which
this personal account in her Introduction seems intended to focus attention on such
larger, more public concerns with which the reader will soon be asked to grapple.