Gothic Tales

Ten of Mary Shelley’s best short stories that push the boundaries of Gothic literature

Mary Shelley is most known for Frankenstein, but in the decades following the release of her magnum opus she produced several novels, poems, short stories, and other forms of writing. Collected here are ten of Shelley’s finest tales that, like Frankenstein, subvert the classist and misogynistic standards of patriarchal Victorian society and offer deep meditations on the nature of life and humanity. Shelley’s tales defy genre, ranging from romance and melodrama to fairy tale and satire to speculative and the Gothic, all mixed with biographical allusions to Shelley’s personal life. Faustian bargains, doppelgängers, time travel, and hints of vampirism and witchcraft loom through these stories but are infused with Shelley’s tender emotionalism and conscious eye for the inequalities of her day. Shelley grounds the Gothic in the humane, leveraging hallmarks of the genre — anachronisms, false heroes, foreboding moods, and shadowy terrains — to show that the darkest monsters may be those already among us.