Gothic Tales

Ten of Mary Shelley's best short stories that push the boundaries of Gothic literature

Mary Shelley is most known for Frankenstein, but in the years following the release of her magnum opus, which were beset by the loss of several children and her husband, she produced novels, poems, short stories, and other forms of writing to sustain herself and her only surviving child. Collected here from this tumultuous period of Shelley's life are ten of her finest tales that, like Frankenstein, subvert the classist and misogynistic standards of patriarchal Victorian society and offer deep meditations on the nature of life and humanity. Shelley's stories defy genre, ranging from romance and melodrama to fairy tale and satire to speculative and the Gothic, all mixed with biographical allusions to Shelley's personal life. Faustian bargains, doppelgängers, time travel, and hints of vampirism and witchcraft loom through these stories but are infused with Shelley's tender emotionalism and conscious eye for the inequalities of her day. Shelley grounds the Gothic in the humane, leveraging hallmarks of the genre -- anachronisms, false heroes, foreboding moods, and shadowy terrains -- to show that the darkest monsters may be those already among us.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author: Mary Shelley
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 10/13/2026
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780143139041

About the Author
Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, famous radical writers of the day. In 1814 she met and soon fell in love with the then-unknown Percy Bysshe Shelley. In December 1816, after Shelley's first wife committed suicide, Mary and Percy married. They lived in Italy from 1818 until 1822, when Shelley drowned, whereupon Mary returned to London to live as a professional writer of novels, stories, and essays until her death in 1851.

Daniel Cook (editor, introduction) is a professor of English at the University of Dundee. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, Gulliver's Afterlives (Bloomsbury, 2026), Frankenstein Retold (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He has also edited or co-edited multiple essay collections and critical editions, such as Austen After 200, The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels and The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Along with Sharon Ruston he is a general editor of the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works of Mary Shelley.