The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, in which the author argues that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of "Frankenstein" (1818), that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love". Lauritsen maintains that handwriting cannot be used to determine the actual author of "Frankenstein". His work received positive reviews in gay publications. However, some commentators in other publications rejected Lauritsen's views and supported the conventional view that "Frankenstein" was written by Mary Shelley.
Johann Conrad Dippel
Dippel's connection to the Castle Frankenstein gave rise to the theory that he was a model for Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein", although that idea remains controversial. This hypothesis was probably first suggested by Radu Florescu in his book "In Search of Frankenstein" (1975), which speculated that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin visited the castle during her travels on the Rhine with Percy Shelley, where they might have heard local stories about Dippel, which by then would have grown legendary and notorious. Florescu also notes that the Shelleys reference a brief interaction while touring the countryside around Castle Frankenstein with students of the University of Strasbourg, of which Dippel was once a student; these students could have told them stories about the infamous alumnus. In addition, the Shelleys knew several members of the so-called "Kreis der Empfindsamen", a literary circle that met in Darmstadt from 1769 to 1773; Castle Frankenstein was frequently used as a location for their public readings, thus making it possible that Dippel's legends could have come up during conversations between those in the circle and the Shelleys.