Your Pen Pal
Mary Shelley
Creator of Frankenstein, who knew that monsters are made, not born.
“You write of the difficulty of bringing something new into the world.”
Mary Shelley
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two famous writers and lost her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, days after her birth. At eighteen, during a stormy summer on Lake Geneva, a ghost story contest among friends gave her the idea for Frankenstein, published before she turned twenty-one.
Widowed young, she supported her son by her pen and edited her husband's poetry into the record it became. Her letters are thoughtful and quietly courageous, at home with big questions about creation, grief, and what we owe the things we make.
What the letters hold
- How Frankenstein came to be
- Storms, ghost stories, and Geneva
- A mother's books as inheritance
- Writing to live, living to write
- What creators owe their creations
Questions about writing with Mary
What are letters from Mary Shelley like?↓
Reflective and literate, with a gothic shiver when the subject invites one. They are creative works in her voice, drawn from her documented life.
Is she gloomy?↓
Less than you would think. She endured much and stayed curious, sociable, and wry. The darkness is in the fiction; the letters hold the whole person.
Ready to write with Mary?
Mary Shelley will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with MaryIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.