"Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors.

In Mary Shelley's original, Victor Frankenstein begins the creation of a female companion for his monster but destroys the second effort prior to completion.

"[5] Furthermore, Jackson's use of hypertext "enables us to recognize the degree to which the qualities of collage— particularly those of appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borders— characterize a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity.

It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down.

[2] Jackson's work includes quotations from the novels of both Shelley and Baum, plus material from Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and other writers.

The structure and the content of the text closely reflect one another because of the piecing-together of Patchwork Girl's physical self features in the narrative as well as the interactive element of the hypertext.

[9] This was featured in The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space as it is "viewed by many as the high point of hypertext literature in the pre-web period of the early digital age.

[13] Bell notes the reliance on the readers' familiarity with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to understand the narrative changes that Jackson creates, as she states "the text presents reading as an organic and unpredictable process which can be dramatically enriched by knowledge of other sources.