Sharon Ruston

Expert in romanticism Sharon Ruston explains how Mary Shelley and her contemporaries wove early 19th-century knowledge and debate about science and medicine and life and death into their works.

Ruston says the question: What is life? was of particular concern to Shelley and other writers. She looks at what they thought of air, blood, sunlight, electricity, and other elements believed to be essential to life. And she explores the contemporary scientific basis behind Victor Frankenstein’s idea that life and death were merely ‘ideal bounds’ he could transgress in the making of the creature.

Ruston is chair of Romanticism at Lancaster University. Her books include Shelley and Vitality, Romanticism: An Introduction, and Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Science, Literature and Medicine of the 1790s.

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