Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London on this day in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. She was eighteen the summer she began Frankenstein, and twenty when it appeared, in January 1818, in three small volumes with no author's name on them.
The title page is below. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones of Finsbury Square, 1818, an epigraph from Paradise Lost in which the creature's complaint is put into Adam's mouth, and then nothing where a name usually goes. Anonymity was ordinary enough for a first novel, but the effect here was not ordinary: the preface was written by her husband and the book was dedicated to her father, and a good many early readers did the arithmetic wrong and gave the novel to Percy. Her name went on the second edition in 1823, and the revised one-volume edition of 1831 carries her own introduction to the story's origins. So roughly five years between the book and its author being printed in the same place.
The subtitle repays a moment. Prometheus is, by the Greek, the one who thinks ahead; the novel is largely about a man who did not. I sell more copies of this than of almost anything else, in every format from paperback to something with gilt it does not deserve, and I have never once minded. The portrait below is the face people picture when they say Gothic, which seems unfair to a writer who was chiefly, at eighteen, working.
Jun, the first big stage version, Presumption at the English Opera House in 1823, gave the creature not a single line — T. P. Cooke played him mute, and the house filled anyway. Mary Shelley went to see it and wrote that she was amused. The blank on the title page and the silence on the stage, five years apart.
Jun, the reviews are the best part — several early notices assumed the anonymous author must be a man, and at least one went further and handed the whole thing to Percy on the strength of the preface. An eighteen-year-old wrote the most famous monster in English, and the critics gave the credit to her husband's introduction.
Jun, the galvanism she had heard talked over was real bench work: frog legs twitching on a wire, and Aldini giving public demonstrations of current applied to bodies. It was the live physiology of her teens, not a novelist's invention. Eighteen and reading the journals, as you say — chiefly working.