Charlotte Gordon is an award-winning author and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Endicott College whose biography Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley won the National Book Critics Circle Award. As the author of the introduction to Penguin’s edition of the 1818 Frankenstein and Mary Shelley: A Very Short Introduction, Gordon is uniquely positioned to illuminate the novel’s complex layers. Her deep understanding of both Mary Shelley and her radical feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, provides crucial context for appreciating Frankenstein’s revolutionary themes and enduring relevance.

Selections of Charlotte Gordon’s Published Work

• Mary Shelley: A Very Short Introduction
• Romantic Outlaws

Charlotte Gordon’s Accolades

• 2015 Editor’s Choice - The New York Times
• Editor’s Choice- London Sunday Times
• Book of the week - BBC Radio4

Charlotte Gordon In The News

• The Washington Post: The Lowells of Massachusetts
• The New York Times: ‘Murder by Candlelight’
• Slate: Dr. Frankenstein’s Advice for Elon Musk
• Huffington Post: Why I Teach Mary Wollstonecraft

Gordon brings a personal journey to her reading of Frankenstein. She confesses that as a teenager, she found the novel “boring,” seeing only its science fiction elements while missing its transformative examination of human relationships. Today, she champions Shelley as a pioneering voice whose work speaks to contemporary concerns about technology, responsibility, and connection. Through Gordon’s guidance, readers discover the beating heart beneath the monster story—a young woman’s powerful meditation on creation, rejection, and what it means to be human.