Thomas, Louisa. "Their Love is Alive." NEWSWEEK September 4, 2009.

It began as a game to pass the time while the rain fell and lightning struck. Visiting Switzerland in June 1816, a small group—young and rivalrous, amorous and ever so literary—agreed to a ghost-story-writing contest. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, could come up with nothing at first. Then she had a nightmare—a walking corpse, glimmering yellow eyes. It delighted her. The next day, she announced to the others that she had imagined a story. Frankenstein was born. Two years later Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was published anonymously. Readers immediately wondered about the author's identity. Some guessed it was the poet Percy Shelley, who had written the novel's preface. Those who knew that the author was Percy's (by then) wife, Mary Shelley, were amazed. Mary later said that she was constantly asked how she, "then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" In an introduction to a revised 1831 edition, she told the Gothic tale of the ghost-story contest. (Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire, were the others present.) As for Percy, she "certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling" in the book, but she did depend upon his encouragement and more. "Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone." The question of whether Mary alone wrote the novel, however, would not die. . . .

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/03/their-love-is-alive.html

Howard, Jennifer. "The Birth of FRANKENSTEIN." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 7, 2008.

Almost from the moment that it was published anonymously on New Year's Day 1818, Frankenstein had readers and critics arguing over its origins. Early rumor held that it wasn't Mary Shelley but her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who deserved the credit. (Or the blame; some early readers were outraged by the novel's idea that a man could play God and create life.) Even after the couple confirmed Mary's authorship and her name appeared on new editions in 1823 and 1831, some critics held on to the idea that Percy was the guiding spirit behind Frankenstein. A few still do. As late as last year, an independent scholar named John Lauritsen dismissed Mary Shelley's claim to authorship. In The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press), Lauritsen argued that "an uneducated, teenaged girl" could not have written the book but that her husband — "one of the greatest poets and prose stylists in the English language" — could have. Lauritsen is an outlier among Shelley scholars, almost all of whom consider Frankenstein to be Mary's work. They also agree that Percy was present at the creation, helping Mary nurture her nightmare inspiration as it grew into a full-blown novel. All the evidence — manuscripts, letters, journals, the Shelleys' own testimony — places Percy at the creative scene. (It's known, for instance, that he embellished the ending and made it, at least in some readers' minds, more melodramatic.) That's where the debate heats up. How much of a participant was Mary Shelley's better half? Should Percy be considered a co-creator of her masterpiece? Was he a co-opter of her genius? Was he Mary's Svengali, her Max Perkins, or merely a good copy editor? Thanks to the dogged textual work of a scholar named Charles E. Robinson, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, readers will now be able to see for themselves what Mary wrote before she turned it over to Percy's editorial ministrations. Last month, the Bodleian Library published Robinson's edition of The Original Frankenstein, a version of the novel that probably comes as close as it's possible to get to the draft that Mary first handed Percy to read. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i11/11b01201.htm. See also Lynda Pratt's "Who Wrote the Original Frankenstein?" TLS October 29, 2008 (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5035717.ece).