“I will Tell my Story, and my Reader shall Judge for Me”: Mary Shelley’s Stories for The Keepsake

Between 1823 and 1839 Mary Shelley was a prolific writer and a steady contributor to the annuals. After she moved back from Italy to London, she published four novels and twenty-one stories as well as some poetical pieces. Her literary contributions for the annuals were accompanied by illustrations of the sort that characterized the periodical market of annuals and gift books of the time. In many of these stories Mary Shelley employs gothic elements such as the supernatural, the dangerous, and the mysterious, linking her later production with her successful publication, Frankenstein. Thus, Shelley’s stories written for the annuals can be read as an extension and development of the gothic elements employed by the author in her first novel. Specifically, the author is building on both the enduring public taste for those gothic elements employed by Ann Radcliffe as well as experimenting with the new genre of the short story. Mary Shelley’s editorial relationship with The Keepsake—a very successful periodical for women that represented the refinements and elegance pervading the English consumerist society of the 1830s—became a fruitful endeavor not only for financial income, but also as a site of literary experimentation in terms of genre and content.