Frankenstein
SynopsisPlot
Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the gothic novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron. "We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Story
About this book
Frankenstein began during the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, where Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron challenged one another to write a ghost story. Godwin, then eighteen, produced a tale about a young scientist named Victor Frankenstein who assembles and animates a creature from dead matter. The novel was first published anonymously in London in 1818, and a revised edition appeared in 1831 with Mary Shelley named as author.
Victor Frankenstein is a university student in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, consumed by the idea of creating life. When his experiment succeeds, he is horrified by the being he has made and abandons it. The creature, intelligent and articulate but rejected by everyone it encounters, turns to violence. The story moves across Europe and eventually into the Arctic, structured as a series of nested narratives: a sea captain's letters frame Frankenstein's own account, which in turn contains the creature's.
The book raises questions about scientific responsibility, isolation, and what a creator owes to what it creates. Shelley wrote it at a time when galvanism and early electrical experiments were generating public curiosity about the boundary between life and death.
