Mary Shelley Trivia
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50 free Mary Shelley trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Mary Shelley trivia quiz is about the woman rather than the monster: the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin who eloped with a married poet at sixteen, wrote Frankenstein at nineteen and outlived almost everyone she loved. The easy questions cover the famous novel, the parents, the poet husband, the ghost-story contest at Byron's villa and the summer of 1816. From there it moves through the life: the secret meetings at her mother's grave, the elopement with her stepsister in tow, the lost babies, the two suicides of 1816, the anonymous first edition everyone assumed Percy had written, the Naples mystery, and the storm off Viareggio. The harder end covers the astronomer who dated her 'waking dream' to the small hours of 16 June, the £60 she got for the 1831 copyright, the false passports she obtained for two women, the proposal from an American actor, the blackmailers of 1845, the brain tumour, and what her son found in her desk a year after she died. Every answer was checked against Shelley's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. For the novel itself, our Frankenstein quiz is the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pioneering advocate of women's rights was Mary Shelley's mother?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that women seemed inferior to men only because they were denied an education; her daughter grew up reading her books.
Q 02What killed Mary Shelley's mother in September 1797?
Childbed fever
Childbed fever killed her 11 days after Mary was born, leaving William Godwin to raise the newborn and her young half-sister Fanny on his own.
Q 03Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is widely counted among the first novels of which genre?
Science fiction
Science fiction claims Frankenstein as a founding novel because its creature is made by a student's laboratory experiments, not by magic or the supernatural.
Q 04What is the first name of the scientist Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's novel?
Victor
Victor is the creator, not the creature: the being he makes is never given a name, though 'Frankenstein' is now often used for the monster itself.
Q 05When Mary Shelley was a girl, which former American vice-president visited her father's London home?
Aaron Burr
Aaron Burr, wandering Europe in exile after killing Alexander Hamilton and standing trial for treason, dined with the Godwins and noted the children in his journal.
Q 06To which Scottish city was the teenage Mary Shelley sent in 1812 to stay with the Baxter family?
Dundee
Dundee hosted her for two long stays; she later called the Tay's shores 'blank and dreary' in hindsight, yet said the 'airy flights of my imagination' were born there.
Q 07Where did Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley declare their love for each other in June 1814?
At her mother's grave
At her mother's grave in St Pancras churchyard, where Mary had long gone to read out of her stepmother's way; she was 16, and he was 21 and already married.
Q 08Whom did Mary and Percy Shelley take with them when they eloped to France in July 1814?
Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont
Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont came too; her mother pursued the runaways to Calais but failed to win her back and went home without her.
Q 09In which region does Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein both open and end?
The Arctic
The Arctic frames the tale: an explorer bound for the North Pole pulls the dying scientist off the ice, hears his story, and at the end watches the creature vanish northward.
Q 10What did Mary Shelley dream about her dead baby in 1815?
It came back to life
It came back to life in the dream, she wrote: 'it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.'
Q 11Which epic poem does the Creature find and read as true history in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost gives the Creature two mirrors: like Adam he was made with no one like him, but he decides Satan is 'the fitter emblem' because he envies others' happiness.
Q 12Which Lake Geneva house, rented by Lord Byron in 1816, hosted the ghost-story contest that produced Frankenstein?
Villa Diodati
Villa Diodati stood on the hill above the Shelleys' lakeside cottage; they walked up most evenings, and the whole party sat talking into the small hours.
Q 13Which young physician travelled with Lord Byron to Geneva in 1816 and joined Mary Shelley's ghost-story circle?
John William Polidori
Q 21Where was Percy Shelley's first wife Harriet found drowned in December 1816?
The Serpentine in Hyde Park
The Serpentine in Hyde Park gave up Harriet's body on 10 December 1816; before the month was out Percy had married Mary, as his lawyers advised, to strengthen his claim to his children.
Q 22Mary Shelley's husband Percy was buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, also the resting place of which poet?
John Keats
John Keats was buried there in 1821; Percy drowned the next year with a volume of Keats in his pocket, and the Shelleys' small son William lies in the same cemetery.
Q 23What did the Chancery Court rule in 1817 about Percy Shelley's children by Harriet?
John William Polidori's own idea for the contest, by Mary's account, was a skull-headed lady; his tale The Vampyre, printed in 1819, was at first wrongly credited to Byron.
Q 14How did Mary Shelley later describe the weather at Lake Geneva in 1816?
'A wet, ungenial summer'
'A wet, ungenial summer' was her phrase in 1831: incessant rain kept the party indoors for days, reading German ghost stories until Byron proposed that each write one.
Q 15Which scientific idea, discussed at Lake Geneva in 1816, fed Mary Shelley's 'waking dream' of a reanimated corpse?
Galvanism
Galvanism, moving dead muscle with an electric current, was notorious from an 1803 London demonstration in which Giovanni Aldini made an executed convict's corpse convulse.
Q 16What did Mary Shelley call Frankenstein when she sent it out again in her 1831 introduction?
'My hideous progeny'
'My hideous progeny' came with a blessing to 'go forth and prosper': she had an affection for the book, she wrote, as 'the offspring of happy days'.
Q 17What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein?
The Modern Prometheus
The Modern Prometheus likens its scientist to the Titan who, in Greek myth, made the first humans and was then punished by Zeus for stealing fire for them.
Q 18Why did many early readers assume Percy Shelley had written Frankenstein?
It was anonymous, with his preface
It was anonymous, with his preface and a dedication to his political hero William Godwin, who was Mary's father; her own name reached the title page only with the second edition.
Q 19Which library holds Mary Shelley's Frankenstein notebooks, which show Percy Shelley's corrections?
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
The Bodleian Library, Oxford, keeps them; Fiona Sampson, who examined the notebooks, judged that Percy 'did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today'.
Q 20How did Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay die in October 1816?
Suicide by laudanum at a Swansea inn
Suicide by laudanum at a Swansea inn: her stepfather Godwin so dreaded the newspapers that the family hid the truth and thought of saying she had gone to her aunts in Ireland.
He was morally unfit to have custody
He was morally unfit to have custody, Lord Chancellor Eldon ruled, weighing his published views and his leaving Harriet for Mary; the court placed the children with foster parents and made him pay for their keep.
Q 24What was the name of Claire Clairmont's daughter by Byron, born in January 1817?
Allegra
Allegra, first called Alba, was handed to Byron in Venice as a toddler; he later placed her in a convent, where she died of a fever aged five.
Q 25Which travel book did Mary Shelley build from the journal of her 1814 elopement with Percy?
History of a Six Weeks' Tour
History of a Six Weeks' Tour retold the 1814 journey, which lasted only that long because the money ran out in Switzerland and the runaways had to turn for home.
Q 26In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, what does the Creature demand that his maker build for him?
A female companion
A female companion is his price for leaving mankind alone; the scientist half-builds her on a remote Orkney island, then tears her apart, and the Creature swears revenge.
Q 27What was the name of Mary's only child to survive to adulthood?
Percy Florence Shelley
Percy Florence Shelley was named for his father and for Florence, the city of his birth in November 1819; his arrival, after the loss of her other children, at last lifted Mary's spirits.
Q 28Which novella about a father's incestuous love for his daughter did Mary write in Italy to cope with grief?
Matilda
Matilda went to her father to be published, but Godwin called its subject 'disgusting and detestable' and kept the manuscript; it stayed out of print until 1959.
Q 29At which German university does the young scientist study in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?
Ingolstadt
Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, is where he builds the Creature in a top-floor workshop and then bolts from the room in horror the moment it opens its eye.
Q 30How did Percy save Mary's life when she miscarried in Italy in June 1822?
He sat her in a bath of ice
He sat her in a bath of ice that arrived before the doctor did, overruling Claire and Jane Williams, who were afraid to use it; the doctor later said it had saved her.