Profs & Pints Denver: Mary Shelley Speaks

Profs and Pints Denver presents: “Mary Shelley Speaks,” a summoning of the author of Frankenstein, with Susan Marie Frontczak, professional storyteller, frequent guest lecturer and teacher of storytelling classes at colleges and universities, and trainer of Chautauqua (“living history”) scholars.

[Doors open at 5 pm and the talk begins at 6:30.]

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley may be best known for her classic gothic novel about a scientific endeavor gone horribly wrong, but there is much more to be learned about her, both personally and psychologically. Profs and Pints, a social enterprise devoted to democratizing access to learning, is offering Denver residents and visitors an unusual opportunity to get to know Shelley as if she had been brought back to life before their eyes.

The speaker, Susan Marie Frontczak, has presented more than 900 deeply researched living history discussions throughout the United States and abroad. She first developed her discussion of Mary Shelley as part of a traveling exhibit by the American Library Association and the National Library of Medicine titled “Frankenstein, Penetrating the Secrets of Nature.” 

Frontczak will give a first-person portrayal of Mary Shelley and then go into two question-and-answer sessions, the first with “Mary,” the second with herself as a scholar. Her talk will examine how Shelley came up with Frankenstein as a young girl of 18 while also giving audience members a much broader understanding of Shelley as teen-age mother, behind-the-scenes supporter of social reform, scholar, and romantic.

You’ll learn how, as well as becoming a significant author in her own right, Mary Shelley bore the combined burden and blessing of being the only offspring between eminent authors Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Likewise, she enjoyed both attention and passion, and she also endured both rejection and isolation, for becoming the wife of the outspoken and controversial poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

With stridently vocal parents and husband, Mary sought a gentler path of persuasion, opening her novels with the admired status quo, and ever so gradually leading the reader to a new point of view. Within Frankenstein it is not the invention, but the abandonment of the invention, that transformed the creation into a monster. 

As Mary reveals her process as an author in creating Frankenstein, you learn how she viewed the world around her and how the world, in turn, treated her. Discover how this author blended themes and events from her own life with their vivid imagination to construct one of the world’s most enduring novels.

Mary Shelley's work raises ethical questions that are, if anything, more pertinent today than they were in her lifetime: The ethics of science and technology that outpace moral development and our social responsibility to the abandoned members of society. Come ready to grapple with such questions while exploring the boundaries of what is possible and the responsibility that comes with discovery. (Advance tickets $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID.)

Image: A Richard Rothwell painting of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley first exhibited in 1840, lightning effects added (National Portrait Gallery of London / Wikimedia Commons).