Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) Frankenstein, 1818.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein draws heavily on Paradise Lost. It opens with the following epigraph from Book X:
"Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?"
~Paradise Lost, X.743-5
Frankenstein’s newly-created monster stumbles upon a copy of Paradise Lost (along with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther) in an abandoned portmanteau in the centre of a forest. He reads the book and is startled to see portrayed in Milton’s God and Adam his relationship with his own creator, the scientist Dr Frankenstein. As the novel progresses, the monster finds himself increasingly taking up Satan’s role in the story.