Lauritsen criticizes feminists for constructing "a Mary Shelley myth, according to which she was a major literary figure, one whose genius had been overshadowed - not only by her husband, but also by the other male Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats."

[5] Kennedy wrote that Lauritsen was "unafraid to go against accepted opinion and the entrenched literary establishment" and that his work was "intriguing and very readable", based on a careful review of the relevant evidence, and a welcome contribution to literature on the subject.

However, he also predicted that while Lauritsen's thesis that Percy Bysshe Shelley is the real author of Frankenstein might be accepted by readers with no vested interest in the issue, it would be "vehemently rejected out of hand" by the "literary establishment".

Paglia compared Lauritsen's work to that of the critic Leslie Fiedler, concluding that The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein was, "a funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear.

"[9] The feminist Germaine Greer dismissed Lauritsen's thesis, writing in The Guardian that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written Frankenstein, his argument fails because "it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given.