that blank incapability of invention
Although Mary Shelley surely
exaggerates the time it took her to begin her
novel as well as the anxious writer's block that inhibited her starting
forth, there is a more serious aspect to this account than her personal
uncertainties. Questions concerning the circumstances of and
responsibility for creativity, the attitude with which intellectual
ambition approaches the unknown, and the moral neutrality of the human
imagination, are deeply inlaid within the structure of
Frankenstein. There is thus a sense in which this personal account
in her Introduction seems intended to focus attention on such larger, more
public concerns with which the reader will soon be asked to grapple.
