Alex Barber gave a talk on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as part of the Belfast Imagine festival on March 28th. In it, he talked about the surprising presence within Mary Shelley’s famous and much-loved novel of her mother and father – the philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

Wollstonecraft, who was called ‘a hyena in petticoats’ and a ‘philosophizing serpent’ (and worse) by male critics, is best known today for her revolutionary manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She died ten days after giving birth to Mary Shelley but, as Alex explained in his talk, her ideas live on in the words of her daughter’s extraordinary novel.