When Mary Shelley initially conceived the plot of Frankenstein, she was still only 18-years old. But she had already lost a child, a daughter who died just two weeks after she was born. The loss of her child induced acute depression in Shelley, and evidence suggests that the grief over the loss, as well as the death of her own mother when she was only 10 days old, may have been, not only part of the inspiration for the novel, but also responsible for the novel’s themes and preoccupation with ideas about abandonment, death … and reanimation. The desire perhaps to revive her deceased daughter.