Mary Shelley was well acquainted with the growing tradition of women writing the language of aesthetics. She records in her journal reading Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Like Radcliffe, Shelley was a traveler and the author of a scenic tour, History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (1817), in which she refers to the castle of Nimeguen, “mentioned in the letters of Lady Mary Montague.” In Paris she and Percy sought her parents' friend Helen Maria Williams, hoping for a loan. And, of course, she knew the writings of both her famous parents. In History of a Six Weeks' Tour Mary, Percy, and Claire Clairmont float down the Rhine: “the sun shone pleasantly, S [helley] read aloud to us Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway, and we passed our time delightfully” (61-62). Amid the picturesque scenes of the Rhine, the daughter pays tribute to her dead mother's revisionist aesthetics.

Shelley carries forward Wollstonecraft's and her fellow women travelers' subversive insistence on representing the voices and subjectivities of those normally objectified by aesthetic discourse. Frankenstein's creature, that memorable character, combines a hideous exterior with an eloquent voice. His relation to the communities that exclude him, beginning with the Frankenstein and De Lacey families, has the charged ambivalence of women writers' relation to aesthetics.