Frankenstein

About this story

Victor Frankenstein is a young scientist who finds out how to give life to something he has built, and then cannot face what he has made. The story is told through letters and nested accounts, so that we hear about the creature’s own side from the creature.

Mary Shelley began it in the summer of 1816, when she was eighteen, during a stay near Lake Geneva with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. They had agreed to each write a ghost story. Her novel was published anonymously in 1818 and she revised it for a new edition in 1831. Its subtitle is The Modern Prometheus, after the Greek myth of the man who stole fire from the gods.

Themes

Responsibility, ambition, loneliness, what we owe what we create

Good for

Anyone who knows the film monster and wants to meet the book’s very different one

Worth noticing

How the creature speaks, and how his account changes how you see Victor.

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