There was once a shy and studious young woman who wrote a story about a parentless innocent, cast out by those who should have protected him. She added to this brew a dose of magic, a peppering of philosophy and all the myths she had ever read. It became the most popular story in the English-speaking world; it spawned other stories, it took over stage and screen; obsessive readers reworked the plot, setting her characters free in stories of their own. The woman watched, bewildered, as her creation went forth and multiplied. What sort of monster, she wondered, had she unleashed? I am describing, of course, the inception of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but it might as well be the birth of Frankenstein. The two books share the same creation myth.

J K Rowling and Mary Shelley were both young mothers when they produced their "hideous progeny", as Shelley called Frankenstein, and they, too, were motherless. Plus each woman had a father from whom she was estranged. They even look weirdly alike, Rowling and Shelley, with their handsome foreheads, long noses, thin lips and wary expressions. As though to cement their sisterhood, Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the film series, stars in a howling dog of a movie called Victor Frankenstein (2015), the latest take on Shelley's fragile novel.

New Statesman