Life & Mortality Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

“Hideous progeny” is an audacious way for Mary Shelley to talk about her own work: a mother blessing a child she also calls monstrous. The line lands because it collapses two creation myths into one. On the surface, she’s sending her book out into the world with the conventional author’s hope that it “prosper.” Underneath, she’s staging the central drama of Frankenstein again: the creator’s complicated attachment to what they’ve made, and the dread of how it will be received once it leaves their hands.

Shelley’s phrasing is pointedly double-edged. “Bid...go forth” borrows the grandeur of biblical language, but she undercuts it with “hideous,” a word that admits shame, anxiety, even preemptive self-defense against critics. It’s the rhetoric of someone who knows the world can be cruel to the strange and the new, and who wants to control the narrative before the narrative is controlled for her. The sentimental beat - “I have an affection for it” - doesn’t soften the sentence so much as sharpen it: affection doesn’t erase horror; it coexists with it.

The second clause is the quiet gut punch. She dates the book to “happy days,” then frames that happiness as a kind of innocence: a time when “death and grief were but words.” For Shelley, those weren’t abstractions for long. The subtext is authorship as time capsule, and publication as reopening a sealed room. She’s not just releasing a novel; she’s releasing the version of herself who could still believe tragedy was only vocabulary.