She’s always been in the background of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” – the teenage girl who understood heart-breaking loss, rejection and obsessive love at too early an age.

But Lookingglass Theatre Company’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” – at the McCarter Theatre Center Oct. 19 – Nov. 3 - brings author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to center stage, drawing parallels between her life experiences and her best-known work.

Shelley “was only 18 when the idea came to her, yet some of the novel’s darkest contours and edges come from her own story,” writer/director David Catlin said. “Young women weren’t supposed to have those thoughts, but she became the writer she would become because of her life experiences.”

The show is ideal for Princeton, which has one of the first 500 printed copies of Shelley’s novel in its library and a well-known “Frankenstein” expert on its faculty. Emily Mann, McCarter’s artistic director, saw the Lookingglass show in Chicago earlier this year, a production one critic praised for its “raw beauty, feverish emotion and …intense physicality.”

“It’s a fascinating story to be looking at in this moment of time. what it is to be the other, how we can create monsters and then abandon them,” Mann said. “I also love looking at it from the human angle and what what the story meant to Mary Shelley herself. When you look at a story through (a lens) that is emotional and personal, you begin to see all the way it has resonance in the present time. There’s a reason people still are interested in this story and still need to tell it.”

Born in 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the daughter of two popular writer/philosophers. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after she was born. While in mourning her father, William Godwin, regularly took toddler Mary to visit her mother’s grave. That’s where she learned to read, her first text the headstone that bore the name she shared with her mother.

Godwin remarried and, at age 12, Mary was sent to live with a Scottish family who were fans of her father’s writings but who had never met him. At age 17, she was back in London and secretly meeting poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at her mother’s grave, where the couple first consummated their relationship.

Shelley was already married, but that didn’t stop him from running away to France with Mary. Her father, who had forbidden her from announcing her love for Shelley, wanted nothing else to do with her.

“There you have the father figure creating life and rejecting it,” Catlin said, “and you see how the rejected creation, over time, feels abandoned, and its reaction is to become monstrous.”

In 1815, Mary had her first child, a daughter who died 10 days later without a name. (She would go on to birth four more children, only one of whom lived to adulthood.) Mary was heavily grieving when she went to Switzerland to spend the summer of 1816 with poet Lord Byron.

The party was rounded out by Shelley, physician John Polidori and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half sister and one of Percy Shelley’s lovers.

“There’s grief and loneliness there,” Catlin said. “Yet despite all this abandonment and loss, she still held on to this notion and ideal of love and there’s something so beautiful about that.”

One day, Byron proposed that each guest write a ghost story. Mary later said the idea for “Frankenstein” came to her in a “waking dream” and during that summer she “first stepped out from childhood into life.” Her novel, published in 1818, is considered the first science fiction novel, a classic creation myth since widely copied and the first work of fiction to center on a “mad scientist” character, although in Mary’s time the term would have been “mad natural philosopher.”

Now more than 200 years later, Chicago-based Lookingglass’s interprets the story using acrobatics, puppets, lighting and wire-work to create a production audiences can engage in “kinetically, viscerally and auditorily,” Catlin said, something Lookingglass has aimed for since its creation in 1988.

“We try to create an experience that engages everyone and ideally pushes the boundaries of what traditional theater is,” said Catlin, one of the eight original company founders. “Because we work from literary mediums, we move from location to location and the audience has to actively engage their imaginations … If we’re doing our job right, we give you just enough. A scene near the North Pole comes from some white fabric, lighting and sound cues. Your imagination has to paint in the rest of the details, which I think is very exciting.”

“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is presented in-the-round, bringing an immediate intimacy to the production.

Five actors perform more than 30 roles, moving between Shelley’s life story and Frankenstein’s fictional one. Cordelia Dewdney plays Mary as well as Elizabeth, the adopted sister Victor Frankenstein loves, and the never named companion Frankenstein creates – and quickly destroys – for the Creature. Walter Briggs embodies Percy Bysshe Shelley and Victor Frankenstein. Keith D. Gallagher is Lord Byron and the Creature. Debo Balogun and Amanda Raquel Martinez play Dr. John Polidori and Claire Clairmont, respectively, and other supporting roles.

“The tale holds extreme relevance today in a world replete with human-like artificial intelligence, zombie-like advertising algorithms that follow us everywhere and other digital horrors,” Catlin said. “Victor’s impulse it to make life, which is noble and beautiful, and yet that becomes corrupted. … What does it take to make us monstrous? What do we need to be human?”

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

McCarter Theatre Center

91 University Place, Princeton

Tickets: $25-110, available online at mccarterorg. Through Nov. 3.

Natalie Pompilio is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She can be reached at nataliepompilio@yahoo.com. Find her on Twitter @nataliepompilio. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.