Mary Shelley, daughter of influential feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote Frankenstein Or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Reiterated and popularised in theatre, film, and song from James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (1931 and 1935) to hybrid adaptations such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Blade Runner (1982), Frankenstein evokes the horror of vengeful progeny and anxiety about misdirected passions. Not simply a living-dead horror narrative, Frankenstein also raises the spectre of tragic and unrequited love: searching in vain for friendship and rejected by a world repulsed by his difference, the creature reciprocates his persecution murdering those his creator loves.

Mary Shelley predates German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche by fifty-plus years, is a novelist rather than a philosopher, and explores the horrors of monstrous life rather than the horrors of conventional moralities, but there are, nevertheless, certain affinities between Shelley's and Nietzsche's reflections on love. While Frankenstein appears to oppose family love to monstrous hatred, the novel could also be read as staging a complex entwining of Victor Frankenstein's saintly wife with his man-made monster. The idyllic familial love Elizabeth represents articulates with the heinous passions associated with the creature suggesting that the ordinary and the odious cannot be easily dissociated. This ambiguous imbrication of the monstrous and the conventionally romantic is also elaborated, through differing images and concepts, in Nietzsche's varying pronouncements on love. Nietzsche, too, reveals the paradoxes inherent in the love relation.