The Two Marys

Set the novel down for one episode and meet the woman underneath it. Charlotte Gordon discovered as a young teacher that Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, and that the experts insisted the connection meant nothing. This is the story of how wrong they were: a girl who learned to read by tracing her own name on her mother's tombstone, a scandalous book that reads like a rulebook for living, and an elopement planned at a graveside. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the drumbeat under Frankenstein. Here is where you learn to hear it.