Most reprints of the work today simply call it Frankenstein or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was not famous enough to be added alongside the name of her work at its first publication (in fact, it was published anonymously), but she did give it a subtitle, which is often skipped today: “or, The Modern Prometheus,” referring at once to the electricity that gave the monster life and the unnatural origins of its creation.

On this day, March 11, in 1818, Mary Shelley, just 21 years of age, published Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, one of the greatest horror and science fiction novels ever written. Mary wrote is as part of a three-way competition between herself and her husband Percy, the poet Lord Byron, and the physician-author John William Polidori, who is widely considered to be the father of vampire fiction.

The subtitle’s reference to Prometheus, a Greek god who according to legend fashioned the first humans out of clay and breathed life into them (and then taught to hunt and fish, against the will of the other gods.) The term “modern Prometheus” came from the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s description of Benjamin Franklin’s work with electricity. Several fringe scientists around Shelley’s time were working on re-animating the dead with the application of electricity.