Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein? A Stylometric Analysis
Abstract
The novel Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, and was first credited to Mary Shelley in a French translation of 1821. Since its publication, several claims - both contemporaneous and recent - have been made suggesting that Frankenstein was actually written by Mary's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. We review the background of this controversy and then apply modern techniques from computational stylometry to determine who the true author is. Based on our analysis, we find extremely substantial evidence that Mary Shelley is indeed the true author of Frankenstein, and that it is very improbable that Percy Bysshe Shelley played a heavy role in composing the text. While our finding confirms mainstream scholarly opinion regarding Frankenstein, our analysis is the first application of stylometric techniques to this question and provides strong objective grounds for favouring Shelley by freeing the question from some of the politics which have traditionally accompanied it.
Related
BibTeX
@misc{suddaby2026mary,
title = {{Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein? A Stylometric Analysis}},
author = {Lee Suddaby and Gordon J Ross},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.02527},
eprint = {2609.02527},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02527},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein? A Stylometric Analysis
AU - Lee Suddaby
AU - Gordon J Ross
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.02527
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02527
AB - The novel Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, and was first credited to Mary Shelley in a French translation of 1821. Since its publication, several claims - both contemporaneous and recent - have been made suggesting that Frankenstein was actually written by Mary's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. We review the background of this controversy and then apply modern techniques from computational stylometry to determine who the true author is. Based on our analysis, we find extremely substantial evidence that Mary Shelley is indeed the true author of Frankenstein, and that it is very improbable that Percy Bysshe Shelley played a heavy role in composing the text. While our finding confirms mainstream scholarly opinion regarding Frankenstein, our analysis is the first application of stylometric techniques to this question and provides strong objective grounds for favouring Shelley by freeing the question from some of the politics which have traditionally accompanied it.
ER -