Women Who Shaped the Mughal Empire

The 500th anniversary of the Mughal Empire's rise prompts a fresh look at the women who helped sustain its politics, culture, commerce and architecture.

Who Were the Women Who Shaped the Mughal Empire?

Nelrose Biswas

Aramco, Nov-Dec 2026 

It is morning in Chandni Chowk, and Old Delhi is coming to life. Cycle rickshaws thread through its narrow lanes as shopfronts open onto one of the capital of India’s great commercial arteries.

Above the crush of signs and freely hanging electrical wires, crumbling facades and overgrown banyan trees pushing through old walls, and beyond the market streets, the Jama Masjid and Red Fort stand as monumental reminders of the Mughal city from which present-day Old Delhi grew.

When Emperor Shah Jahan established Shahjahanabad as his imperial capital in the 17th century, his daughter Jahan Ara Begum helped shape its civic and commercial landscape. She commissioned the bazaar that became Chandni Chowk, together with a caravanserai (a fortified, luxury roadside inn), a public bath and an adjoining garden.

The city offers a fitting point from which to reconsider an empire whose history has so often been told through its men.

Completed in 1628, the mausoleum in Agra, India, that she commissioned for her parents exemplifies her influence on architecture.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

This year marks 500 years since 1526, when Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur, a Timurid prince from Ferghana in present-day Uzbekistan, defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of Panipat and established the Islamic dynasty that would become known as the Mughal Empire. Five centuries later, the imprint of the Mughals, who also known as the Gurkānī dynasty, remains embedded across South Asia’s architecture, art, language, literature, food and popular imagination. 

But the anniversary invites another question: Who gets remembered as having built an empire?

“The contribution [of Mughal women] lay not merely in their position within the imperial household but in their participation in shaping the ethical, cultural and political ethos of the empire,” says professor Shadab Bano of Aligarh Muslim University, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, whose research includes women and gender relations in medieval India.

The familiar dynastic story revolves around the great imperial names: Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. Around them were women who advised rulers, negotiated politics, controlled substantial wealth, participated in long-distance trade, commissioned buildings and public spaces, traveled vast distances and recorded the dynasty’s history.

In this detail of a work by Mughal court painter Sānvalah, Isan Daulat Begum counsels her grandson Babur. She served as his chief adviser.

Sānvalah/The Morgan Library & Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Yet most remain far less familiar than the grandsons, fathers, husbands, sons and brothers alongside whom they exercised power.

The reason comes down to “the lack of information, and at times, silence, on Mughal women in [surviving] historical sources,” says historian Mehreen Chida-Razvi, who is associated with the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. 

Historiography compounded that imbalance. “Colonial writing painted the harem as a passive space in which women existed as objects of male desire with no political agency,” says professor Taymiya Zaman, a historian of Mughal India at the University of San Francisco.

The reality was more complex. Though zenana, or women’s quarters, was spatially isolated private residential space, it was not necessarily isolated from imperial affairs. Through family relationships, staff and messengers, property, patronage and access to the emperor, its women could remain closely connected to political and economic life. Historian Ruby Lal argues that these quarters became more formally institutionalized under Akbar as the once peripatetic dynasty developed an increasingly structured imperial court.

Five hundred years after the empire’s foundation, looking again at its women changes more than the cast of characters. It changes our understanding of where Mughal power operated.

Detail of portraits likely depicting Gulbadan and Gulchihra, daughters of Babur, by painter Dust Muhammad, 1546.

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—PreuBischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin State University)/Wikimedia Commons

The Women Behind a Dynasty

Even before Babur established the empire in 1526, powerful women were helping sustain the family’s dynastic ambitions.

Babur’s own memoir, the Baburnama, makes that clear. Of his maternal grandmother, Aisan Daulat Begim, he wrote: “For tactics and strategy, there were few women like my grandmother. She was very intelligent and a good planner. Most affairs were done by her counsel.”

It is a revealing admission. Before there was a wealthy Mughal Empire to administer, women were already helping preserve the political ambitions of the family that would create it. 

Lal, professor of history in the Department of Middle East and South Asian Studies at Emory University in the United States, has drawn attention to the roles of Babur’s mother and grandmother during those uncertain early years. Their influence suggests that female participation in Mughal politics was not a product of the empire’s later wealth and stability; it was embedded in the Timurid world from which Babur emerged.

Through family relationships and access to the emperor, women such as Hamida Banu Begum, depicted in 1550, the mother of third Mughal Emperor Akbar, could stay close to political and economic life.

Anthology of Mir ‘Ali (Bayaz)/National Museum of India/Wikimedia Commons

The next generation left something rarer still: a Mughal history written by a woman.

Gulbadan Bano Begum, Babur’s daughter, was born in 1523, three years before the Battle of Panipat. She lived through Babur’s death, her half-brother Humayun’s exile and the restoration and consolidation of the empire under her nephew Akbar.

Late in her life, at Akbar’s request, she drew on decades of observation and family memory to write the work now known as the Humayun-nama.

“Her text is the only Mughal history authored by a woman, and there’s just one extant copy, which is itself incomplete,” Zaman, the professor, says. It’s kept at the British Library’s India Office collections. “Meanwhile, many copies exist of official chronicles penned by or commissioned by kings.” 

That disparity matters. Official chronicles foregrounded emperors, battles, administration and kingship. Gulbadan brings into view the emotional and domestic texture of the dynasty—births and marriages, journeys and separations, quarrels, deaths and reconciliations.

In one striking scene, as Babur lies dying, Gulbadan describes Humayun breaking down and urgently summoning physicians to find a remedy. An emperor’s death becomes a family crisis: The conqueror appears as a dying father, recalled by his daughter through the distress of his son.

Humayan’s Tomb in New Delhi became synonymous with Mughal architecture. The mausoleum, completed in 1570, contains the tombs of the emperor as well as those of Bega Begum, Hamida Begum and Dara Shikoh.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

Wealth Beyond the Zenana

Under Gulbadan’s nephew, Emperor Akbar (rule 1556-1605), the imperial family expanded through marital alliances with powerful Rajput houses, bringing women from different regional, cultural and linguistic backgrounds into the Mughal household. Their influence could extend far beyond it.

Mariam-uz-Zamani, the Rajput princess who married Akbar in 1562 and became the mother of his successor, Jahangir, demonstrates the extraordinary economic reach some imperial women acquired.

As queen mother she held considerable resources and became a major participant in the maritime economy connecting Mughal India with the Red Sea. Her most famous ship, the Rahimi, was among the largest Mughal vessels of its time, carrying valuable commercial cargo as well as pilgrims traveling toward Makkah.

“The scale of Mariam’s fleet was extraordinary,” Zaman says. Maritime trade was only one element of Mughal women’s financial lives, she adds. Women also held revenue-generating estates and commissioned caravanserais, mosques, tombs, gardens and public spaces while patronizing art, music and literature.

Mariam-uz-Zamani commissioned architectural and charitable projects, including the grand mosque that bears her name, built in 1614 in Lahore, modern-day Pakistan.

As queen mother she could also issue orders bearing the royal seal—evidence that imperial women’s economic power could intersect with administrative authority.

A painting by royal court painter Bishandas shows the court waiting as Mariam-uz-Zamani, wife of Akbar, gives birth to Jahangir. The queen mother played a big role in the maritime economy connecting Mughal India with the Red Sea.

Bishandas/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Wikimedia Commons

Nur Jahan: Authority Made Visible

On the eastern bank of the river Yamuna in Agra stands another material argument for the ambitions of Mughal women. Light enters the tomb of I’timad-ud-Daulah through carved marble screens and falls across walls covered with flowers, vessels, trees and geometric patterns that vividly stand out in colored stone.

The mausoleum was commissioned by Nur Jahan for her parents, Mirza Ghiyas Beg—who held the title I’timad-ud-Daulah—and Asmat Begum. Built between 1622 and 1628, it represents a major shift in Mughal architecture.

“It’s the first major tomb built in white marble with inlaid semiprecious stones,” says Zaman. “The marble-and-inlay work is what Shah Jahan scaled up dramatically in the Taj Mahal.”

Nur Jahan’s influence reached beyond architecture. Born Mihr-un-Nissa, she married Emperor Jahangir in 1611 at about age 34 and received the title Nur Jahan, meaning “Light of the World.” According to Lal, she became his co-sovereign during the later years of his reign—an exceptional degree of publicly acknowledged authority for a Mughal imperial woman. Coins even bore her name.

Mika Natif of George Washington University in the US describes her as “a gutsy, smart, sharp and creative woman whose authority was unusual because it was “more openly recognized and institutionalized.”

Razvi cautions, however, against interpreting that authority as independent sovereignty. Nur Jahan exercised her prerogatives with Jahangir’s consent. That itself raises a revealing question about how historians understand shared power.

“The strength of women,” Zaman says, “is often seen as the weakness of men, so if a man has a strong wife, he must be weak. Alternatively, we could see Jahangir as being fairly shrewd in knowing that Nur Jahan could handle statecraft and admiring her for it.” 

Babur seeks his grandmother's advice.

Sānvalah/The Morgan Library & Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Jahan Ara and the Architecture of Influence

Political authority did not always resemble Nur Jahan’s unusually public form of power.

When Mumtaz Mahal—Shah Jahan’s wife and the woman for whom he built the Taj Mahal—died in childbirth in 1631, her 17-year-old daughter Jahan Ara became Padshah Begum, the premier woman of Shah Jahan’s court. She was entrusted with the imperial seal and acquired substantial wealth and responsibility. 

“Jahan Ara’s most distinct contribution lay in the way she exercised authority through patronage, charity and the creation of public spaces,” Bano says. 

Her charitable activities included supporting hospitals and free kitchens and assisting pilgrims traveling on her ships. Her architectural and religious patronage similarly extended beyond the palace. At Ajmer, she supported separate quarters for women visiting a religious shrine; in Delhi, her projects included the caravanserai, garden and commercial landscape associated with Chandni Chowk. 

The origins of Robin Hood

'He was not a hero': How the dark, violent medieval origins of Robin Hood were erased

Caryn James

17 June 2026

Robin Hood began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century before morphing into a heroic, family-friendly stereotype – here's how new takes are restoring his dark side.

When writer and director Michael Sarnoski began shooting his new film, he showed the cast and crew one he has always loved. It was Disney's 1973 animated Robin Hood, its hero a fox with a feather in his green cap, robbing the rich to give to the poor.

That beloved version could not be further from The Death of Robin Hood, Sarnoski's dark, thoughtful drama. Hugh Jackman stars as a grey-haired, battle-weary Robin, reflective at the end of his life and acutely aware of his own legend.

Warning: This article contains a graphic description of violence that some may find upsetting.

When he encounters a woman who talks about the virtuous, justice-seeking Robin Hood, he denies who he is and speaks of himself in the third person. "He was not a hero. He robbed and killed for the joy of it, nothing more."

It turns out that this violent Robin Hood and other revisionist takes pushing back against his heroic, do-gooder image are closer to the original medieval legends than the family-friendly stereotype we might think of today.

Knowing the Disney Robin Hood and then reading the Death of Robin Hood, those two versions of the character, really stuck with me as a kid – Michael Sarnoski

The depiction of Robin Hood has morphed through the centuries, each change reflecting the era that reinterpreted him. These darker 21st-Century variations look backward to the story's origins, but as some of their creators note, they also speak to the present. Complicated views of the character challenge a polarised world in which heroes and villains are often starkly good or bad, as simplified as the Robin Hood legend became over the centuries.

Who was Robin Hood?

Although there has been plenty of speculation about an actual Robin Hood, historians largely agree that there was no single, living person behind the character, just a vastly unequal society of wealthy landowners and impoverished peasants that inspired his creation. The stories began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century, but the first written accounts didn't arrive until two centuries later, in ballads that showed him as a celebrated figure even then.

In those first written accounts, he wasn't the noble Sir Robin of Locksley as later versions made him. He wasn't noble at all, but a yeoman, a rung above a peasant. There was no Maid Marian in the story until the 16th Century. And while he was perfectly nice to the poor, helping them was not his main purpose. His enemies were the corrupt clergy and the land-owning nobles who took advantage of their underlings.

Stories about Robin Hood began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century – with the first written accounts arriving 200 years later (Credit: Getty Images)

In an afterword to her revisionist novel, The Traitor of Sherwood Forest (2025), medieval historian Amy S Kaufman describes the Robin Hood of the early legends as "a morally grey medieval trickster," and a "violent, irreverent rogue". Disney was right about one thing: the first ballads suggest that Robin was as sly as a fox.

A major change in the story came in the 16th Century. King Henry VIII was a fan and sometimes dressed up as Robin Hood. During the reign of the monarch who split from the Catholic Church, Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary vanished from the legend.

As the upper classes embraced him, in influential chronicles of the time the character no longer hated the nobility, but became noble himself. Positioned as a morally upright nobleman battling his disreputable equals, he stopped questioning the power structure of society. He was enlisted to help the good King Richard return to the throne that had been usurped by his evil brother, Prince John, a trope that persists through Disney's depiction of John as a greedy, power-hungry lion.

Disney's 1973 film with a fox Robin solidified his swashbuckling do-gooder image in the culture (Credit: Alamy)

During the 19th Century, children's books helped turn Robin Hood even more into a sanitised do-gooder acceptable to the Victorians. And in the 20th Century, cinema perpetuated that portrayal, with the matinee idol Errol Flynn as the swashbuckling Sir Robin in 1938's popular The Adventures of Robin Hood. Disney, in perhaps the most formative version, solidified that image in the culture.

'Two versions of the same character'

Sarnoski tells the BBC that the contrast between the Disney film and the original legends has fascinated him since childhood, when he read a storybook version of the medieval ballad The Death of Robin Hood. There, Robin dies quietly, killed by an evil prioress and her lover. "Knowing the Disney Robin Hood and then reading the Death of Robin Hood, those two versions of the character – trying to grapple with that and understand how that can be the same character really stuck with me as a kid," he says.

I grew up on the fox Robin Hood, and then I went into medieval studies and discovered the ballads and thought, 'Where's my Robin Hood that I know and love?' – Amy S Kaufman

In Sarnoski's film, Robin is injured during a graphic battle – an arrow flies through the back of a boy's head and comes out through his eye – and is taken to a priory to recover. Jodie Comer plays the prioress, who, departing from the ballad's depiction of her, is kind.

"I didn't want the prioress to just be this simple evil nun and I didn't want Robin to just be this simple goodly hero," Sarnoski says, about creating more nuanced characters. And as Robin reflects on and begins to regret his past, "It [the film] really becomes a story about him grappling with his own legend and then grappling with his own desire for what he sees as a right death," he says.

Hugh Jackman stars in the new A24 film, a revisionist take on Robin Hood that harks back to the original, dark medieval legend (Credit: A24)

The falsity of legends is also a major theme in Kaufman's novel, and Disney shaped her early impressions too. She tells the BBC, "I grew up on the fox Robin Hood, and then I went into medieval studies and discovered the ballads and thought, 'Where's my Robin Hood that I know and love?'"

The Traitor of Sherwood Forest centres on the fictional Jane, a peasant who falls for Robin Hood's legend. She swoons over him and becomes part of his outlaw band, but begins to wonder if his heroic image and the seductive Robin himself have led her astray. Kaufman's Robin, neither hero nor villain, is true to the character's origins. In the ballads, she says, "He is incredibly subversive when you look at the way he goes up against people in power, like kings, like nobility, like the church. But he also, in every one of the ballads, either has a tragic end or is a victim of his own flaws."

In the last century, such complex views of Robin Hood have been rare. On screen, actors from Douglas Fairbanks to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe have played the part, and almost all follow the stereotypical image. One notable outlier is Robin and Marian (1976), a smart, elegant film that deserves to be much better known. Sean Connery plays the ageing Robin, reunited after decades with Marian (Audrey Hepburn), now a prioress. This Robin denies that the legendary stories are true, and is contemplative at the end of his life. "I keep thinking of all the death I've seen," he tells Marian, and wonders what it was for.

On screen, actors from Douglas Fairbanks to Kevin Costner have played the part, and almost all follow the stereotypical image (Credit: Getty Images)

Such questions – about power, heroes, and how their stories are told – are exactly what make revisionist views feel so contemporary. "The world is consolidating power in ways similar to what the Middle Ages had," Kaufman says. "Some of the things that they had to think about are things that we are going to have to think about."

Sarnoski points out how his characters wield stories as power. "Robin used stories as a weapon and as a way to perpetuate violence," as he lured in followers, he says, while "The prioress uses stories as a way to help and heal people."

Those strategies are everywhere today. "We are so steeped in narrative right now between social media and the internet and just everything that's swirling around us," Sarnoski says. "We're so quick to dive into camps and tribalism and create heroes and villains and not live in the grey area that life actually exists in."

As bracing as darker new versions of Robin Hood are, they are not likely to replace the Disneyfied image. "Not everybody wants to have their Robin Hood fantasy disrupted," Kaufman says. "He's become like Santa Claus in the sense that he stands for something bigger than whatever the actual legend was."

Frankenstein horror story is so misunderstood

'It speaks to us about being human': Why Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's chilling 1818 horror story is so misunderstood

Rebecca Laurence

30 October 2026

A groundbreaking classic of the horror genre that has inspired generations, why is the message of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel still overshadowed by its success, more than two centuries on?

"It's alive! It's alive!! It's alive!!!" – Frankenstein (dir: James Whale, 1931)

One night during the strangely cool and wet European summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We will each write a ghost story," Lord Byron announced to the assembled party, which included Byron's doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).

"I busied myself to think of a story," she wrote. "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Her tale became a novel, published two years later as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying "creature" in fear and disgust.

Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its central tragedies – the dangers of "playing God" on one hand; parental abandonment and societal rejection on the other – are as relevant today as ever.

Mary Godwin (later Shelley) first thought of the story that became Frankenstein when she was 18 years old (Credit: Alamy)

And are there any other fictional characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two central archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the "creature" and the overambitious "mad scientist", lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theatre and filmgoers as two of the most enduring icons not just in the horror genre – but in cinematic history.

Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison's horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood's Universal Pictures and Britain's Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes.

The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T'Pau's China in Your Hand: "It was a flight on the wings of a young girl's dreams/ That flew too far away… And we could make the monster live again". In 2025, sci-fi/horror director Guillermo del Toro finally realised his childhood dream of bringing Frankenstein to the screen, a true labour-of-love project that was more than 30 years in the making.

Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film was the first time the story of Frankenstein appeared on screen (Credit: Alamy)

As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix "Franken-" thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem-cell research and both to characterise and assuage fears about AI. In the more-than-two centuries since she wrote it, Mary Shelley's tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett's 1962 novelty song, Monster Mash (itself inspired by Boris Karloff's performance), has truly been "a graveyard smash" that "caught on in a flash".

'Mysterious fears of our nature'

"All them scientists – they're all alike. They say they're working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!" – Young Frankenstein (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974).

But why was Mary Shelley's vision of "science gone wrong" so resonant at the time? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term "science" existed, the concept of a "scientist" didn't. Great societal change often brings fear that is played out through culture. "With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology, " says Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from a completely outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what might conceivably happen if people – and in particular overreaching or out-of-control scientists – went too far.

Several points of popular 19th-Century intellectual discourse appeared in the novel. Mary Shelley's writings reveal that in that 1816 Villa Diodati tableau, Shelley and Byron discussed the "principle of life". Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book's 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted "galvanism" as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani's experiments using electric currents to make frogs' legs twitch. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary Shelley's father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of "overreaching".

Luigi Galvani’s experiments using electricity to reanimate dead frogs was possibly one of the inspirations for the novel (Credit: Alamy)

Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there's little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific detail in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: "With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." The "science" of the novel is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide a malleable reference point for the following two centuries' greatest moments of change and fear.

Monster mash-up

But surely the reason Frankenstein became a shorthand for anxieties about science is down to the impression the "monster" and "mad scientist" have had on its audience. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:

"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that Hollywood's vision secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it

With his "yellow skin", "watery eyes" and "shrivelled complexion", the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Victor Frankenstein had imagined. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theatre, and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling writes, "set the tone for future dramatisations". They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements that audiences would recognise today, including the comical lab assistant, the line "It lives!" and a monster who barely speaks.

James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures starred Boris Karloff as the creature (Credit: Alamy)

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood's incarnations (notably James Whale's 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it. "Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations," Frayling writes. "It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualisers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein." And so, a movie legend was born.

And just as Hollywood cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version, she had borrowed from historical and Biblical stories to create her own message and mythology. The subtitle of the novel, "The Modern Prometheus", recalls the figure of ancient Greek and Latin myth who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, and represents the dangers of overreaching. The novel's other great allusion is to God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book's epigraph: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?". It is arguably the creature's humanity – and his tragedy – that in his cinematic transformations into a mute but terrifying monster, has often been forgotten.

The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the latest adaptation

Shelley gave the creature a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest's Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature's lament is haunting: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

If the creature is perceived as a misshapen human rather than a monster, his tragedy deepens. He is first rejected by his creator, which Christopher Frayling called "that post-partum moment", and is often identified as a parental abandonment. Considering that Mary Shelley had lost her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft at birth, had just buried her own baby girl, and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – birth (and death) is pertinent.

The newborn creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. It's a robust allegory for a responsibility to children, outsiders or those who don't conform to conventional ideals of beauty. "The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein – as we've all taken risks, we've all had hubristic moments – and partly with the creature, they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves" Fiona Sampson says. "They both speak to us about being human. And that's incredibly powerful."

The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the most recent adaptation, however. Before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, director Guillermo Del Toro told Variety that his version, which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature, was less a horror than about "the lineage of familial pain", with Isaac the abusive father abandoning his son, the creature.

Guillermo del Toro's new film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein (Credit: Netflix)

"He was an outsider. He didn't fit into the world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid," Del Toro said of the creature, going on to describe Shelley's story as being central to his own life and work. "Frankenstein is a song of the human experience… There's so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel." When he was collecting a Bafta in 2018 for a different monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for inspiring him. "She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us".

Surely it would seem unfathomable that when the then-Mary Godwin first thought up her chilling monster parable in that summer of 1816, she could have imagined that it would go so far to shape culture and society, science and fear, continuing to inspire debate – and art – well into the 21st Century.

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? More than 200 years since its publication, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is no longer a tale of "thrilling horror" but its own myth, sent out into the world.

Why is the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels so misunderstood?

'Depicts humanity at its most grotesque': Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels is so misunderstood

Tamlin Magee

First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"?

You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer.

It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago.

Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs, or the society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who calmly debate eradicating the Yahoos, their brutish human-like cohabitants.

In the three centuries since Swift set out to "vex the world, rather than divert it", as he wrote, two Gullivers have competed for the public imagination: one, the excoriating, misanthropic satire that sends up the Crown, the Church and English politics, and the other, a fantastical nursery tale of an adventurer navigating worlds big and small.

Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure – Abigail Williams

Packed with toilet humour, the original Gulliver's Travels also takes aim at the legal system, colonialism and, ultimately, human nature. It darkly concludes with a Gulliver so disgusted by humans after meeting the rational Houyhnhnms that he spends his final days locked in a stable with a horse.

From its very first edition, Swift's tale has been chopped and changed, adapted and altered. Eventually, the story became larger than life, much like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput.

The image of Gulliver surrounded by tiny Lilliputians has been replicated ever since Jonathan Swift's novel was published (Credit: Getty Images)

"It's perhaps one of the most adapted texts in the world," says Daniel Cook, author of Gulliver's Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation. It has sparked spin-offs, illustrations, plays and films, all contributing to a broad "Gulliveriana". The titular antihero has appeared in Doctor Who and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he's met Tony Blair, and appears everywhere from family-friendly Disney romps to Soviet critiques of capitalism.

And of all the adaptations, it was those that simplified and sanitised the tale that endured most in the popular imagination, where the darkest episodes were edited, abridged or expunged.

"I doubt Swift would've envisaged Gulliver's Travels would last to the 21st Century, in the form we know it now," says Abigail Williams, professor of English at King's College, London, who once enlisted her infant son and an FBI analyst to decrypt nonsense words in Swift's letters. "Swift intended Gulliver's Travels to be a series of topical and general satires on humankind, not a kind of adventure."

"That's the really extraordinary thing," she adds. "He's taking the mick out of [adventure stories], but takes enough energy from them that Gulliver's Travels becomes an adventure story in its own right."

From satire to swashbuckling fairy-tale

Swift's peer and friend John Gay famously described the novel as "universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery". Upon its pseudonymous publication in 1726 – a precautionary manoeuvre given its outrageous content – the story was a hit, and the first run quickly sold out. Its fantastical elements appealed to young readers just as its cynical mockeries of humankind did to the literati. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire was in London and greatly enjoyed Gulliver's Travel – it influenced his own satirical Bildungsroman (coming-of age story), Candide.

Yet the tale was already being altered. Publisher Benjamin Motte added in defences of the reigning Queen Anne and removed some of the more quarrelsome political screeds. The reproduction of Gulliver's Travels through inexpensive booklets, called chapbooks, further simplified and changed Swift's story. "For most people, the book was pretty expensive when it first appeared," says Williams. These chapbooks, however, were an unexpected, roaring success with younger audiences.

Gulliver's combat with the wasps – the outrageous content of Swift's novel made it a hit with both young readers and the literati (Credit: Getty Images)

Half-a-century later, a publisher spotted an opportunity. Two decades after Swift died in 1776, Francis Newbery released an abridgement that boiled the story down even further. He cut out the land of Laputa, whose daft experiments in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers lampooned the scientific work of the Royal Society, and the talking-horse Houyhnhnms entirely.

The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy – Hester Grant

This edition was more swashbuckling fairy-tale fare than satire, focusing on Gulliver's capers among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. Younger audiences, perhaps appropriately, would not read of the small Gulliver noticing pockmarks and sores on the gigantic Brobdingnagians (or his allusions to being used to pleasure the queen's chambermaids), nor his efforts in putting out a Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it. Though scenes like these "carried on the great scatological tradition seen in Shakespeare and Chaucer", says Cook, they were, perhaps appropriately, deemed unfit for children.

By the 1790s, abridgements became the norm, with Gulliver's Travels becoming a much bigger hit in continental Europe than in England. "It was adapted into German, French, and Spanish very quickly," says Cook, "and they tended to use the simplified version. There's a crossing of language barriers."

Over time, cultural and religious views stratified Gulliver's Travels even further, on the one hand a bizarre parody full of body horror and the other a whimsical nursery tale.

'A complete attack on humanity'

Though the Victorians were not nearly as priggish as is assumed, they "largely loathed Gulliver," says Grant. Particularly rankling was the idea that humanity could be reduced to the brutish Yahoos in the land of the Houyhnhnms. In his 1853 book The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, Vanity Fair novelist William Makepeace Thackeray described the book as "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, and obscene". The Victorian author and critic Edmund Gosse concluded that Swift's "misanthropic genius" could only have been conceived by a diseased mind: "His vertigo became chronic, and so did his misanthropy... there is something which suggests a brain not wholly under control."

"The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy," says historian Hester Grant. "So I think they were largely responsible for expurgating and stripping the ugly, as they perceived it, satire, and leaving this lovely, clean work of the imagination."

This fourth voyage was viewed as a "complete attack on humanity", according to Cook, and its seemingly irreligious nature was what really shocked people. "It's Swift saying we are like the Yahoos," Cook says. "People thought making fun of the pettiness of politicians in voyage one was fine. We all know politicians are useless. But it's the fourth voyage where he's attacking the very basis of what it means to be a human being. It's no coincidence that, when we think about the children's version of Gulliver's Travels, it's just the first two voyages. We don't really get the full adaptation."

Gulliver meets a society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who debate eradicating the Yahoos, their human-like cohabitants (Credit: Getty Images)

Swift penned his own epitaph, which read: "Where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart". Fantastical and imaginative though Gulliver's Travels was, there's no getting away from that sense of indignation fuelling the tale.

Like the war that rages in the story between "Big-endian" and "Little-endian" factions, the supposed misanthropy of Jonathan Swift is the subject of intense academic debate. There are those, like Thackeray, who believe Swift really did hate humankind, while others view the witless character of Gulliver as the object of satire.

Gulliver's Travels was a late-career magnum opus for Swift, who'd long been a formidable satirist and political propagandist for the Conservatives in Westminster. He felt these were his glory years, when he wrote influential political pamphlets and rubbed shoulders with Tory grandees.

This charmed life died with Queen Anne in 1714, when the ministry he served collapsed. Swift "mourned the loss of political power," says Grant, and above all felt hard done by. Having hoped for a cosy senior position in the Church of England, he was instead rewarded with the deanship of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, which Swift viewed practically as exile. "That feeds very much into Gulliver's Travels, with all its satire of courts and talk of ingratitude and betrayal," says Grant.

Gulliver's Travels was a late-career magnum opus for Swift, who'd been a formidable satirist and political propagandist for the Conservatives in Westminster (Credit: Getty Images)

Though the writer was born in Dublin, Swift had a complicated relationship with Ireland, calling his home country a "wretched, dirty, dog-hole and prison" and "a place good enough to die in". But he also became a champion of Irish autonomy against England, reflected in political and parts of Gulliver's Travels – such as the flying island of Laputa keeping the Balnibarbi below in check, by threatening to crush revolts in their capital of Lindalino, a stand-in for Dublin.

This was all too controversial for Motte's first edition, which removed that critique on colonial subjugation. But Grant believes this is evidence that Swift was a reformer, who wanted to change the world through satire, rather than criticising humankind in a vacuum.

"He depicts humanity at its most grotesque because he wanted to shake his reader from the inertia that allows man to go about our everyday lives when terrible things are happening all around," says Grant. "He's beating us around the head, saying, 'this is what you're like, go do something about it.'"

The legacy of Gulliver's Travels now towers as tall as a Brobdingnagian giant. It is one of the most studied English books of all time, yet possibly one of the least understood due to its many sanitised adaptations. Its language has entered the lexicon, and been further adapted in the digital age, with the "endianness" of computer bytes and the search engine Yahoo. Even AI seemed to have been predicted, in a sense, with a great hand-cranked "knowledge engine" that produces books and mathematics without any expertise on behalf of the user.

It may have been the horrors of the 20th Century that put the original voyages back under the lens. Titans of literature from George Orwell to Sylvia Plath all referenced the text; Orwell called Swift a "Tory anarchist" who, with his "rancorous, pessimistic" fable, foresaw modern totalitarianism in the joyless dystopia of the Houyhnhnms.

Whether the original satire or its many bowdlerised editions, and whatever Swift's original intentions, Gulliver's Travels became much larger than itself. Rudyard Kipling said that Swift "tried to bring an indictment against all humanity, but left a book for children".

But perhaps Swift would have been both amused and dismayed by the endless debate and mutations of his picaresque tale.

"I think he would despair," says Williams. "He was so critical of the dumbing down of contemporary culture. But it's also a text that really plays with misunderstanding, like a lot of Swift's writing.

"Maybe Swift would be delighted by the fact that it was being misunderstood."

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