On Ghosts

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley’s essay On Ghosts, written in 1824, only a few years after the tragic death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and published in the same year in the London Magazine, moves away from the traditional Gothic horror of her novels. Instead, it explores the psychological and philosophical nature of the supernatural, questioning why we are so drawn to the idea of the "returned dead".

In this work, Shelley adopts a surprisingly skeptical and rationalist tone. She begins by admitting that, despite our modern advancements, the human imagination still clings to the possibility of ghosts. However, her approach is not one of a believer in the occult, but rather one of a keen observer of human emotion.