The publication presents two of the most significant novels by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, one of the key figures in the literature of British and European romanticism. The famous “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” is the fruit of a competition started by Lord Byron at the Swiss Villa Diodati in June 1816 in writing “Gothic” stories - turned out to be the first and, as it turned out over time, the main book of Mary Shelley, forever inscribing her name in the history of literature and culture. An original philosophical novel, one of the brightest examples of romantic “Gothic”, “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” was at the same time the starting point of the science fiction tradition in the narrative prose of New and Contemporary times. In less than two centuries, this book, conceptually going back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, itself gave birth to an extensive and influential cultural mythology, growing with ever new texts, images and meanings: the name of the daring Swiss experimental scientist Victor Frankenstein was firmly imprinted in the memory of Western culture, and the author invented The book's tragic and terrible plot turned out to be open to all sorts of artistic, ideological and scientific interpretations. In this edition, the novel is printed in the 1831 edition, which is noticeably different from the text of the first edition and represents the final embodiment of the author's creative will; at the same time, in the commentary - for the first time in Russian - all the fragments of the first edition that are significant for the translated version of the book, which are also of considerable literary interest, are published. They give a full picture of the evolution of Mary Shelley’s ideological and philosophical views and artistic attitudes. For the first time, the novel “The Last Man” is published in Russian translation, which shares the theme of the author’s debut book with the existential test of a personality involved by the will of fate and the logic of history in inescapably tragic life circumstances . Apocalyptic moods and dystopian motifs (allowing us to consider this work as an early example of futurological fiction) are combined in “The Last Man” with a poignant love story and obvious elements of the “novel with a key” - a classical literary form that involves “coding” in the text of real persons and authentic situations, known to the reader: in a slightly veiled form, the book depicts key figures from Mary Shelley’s romantic circle - Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Claire Clairmont and others.