Frankenstein

Frankenstein

Summary

'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 . . .'

What you create can destroy you.

One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the Arctic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ship's captain. That man is Victor Frankenstein and his story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final scientific frontier and create life. But his unnatural creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.

Written when she was only nineteen, Shelley's gothic tale is one of the greatest horror stories ever written.

Reviews

  • A haunting, melancholy work of gothic beauty
    Independent

About the author

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.
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