- Published: 1 May 2003
- ISBN: 9780141439471
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $23.00
Frankenstein
Or The Modern Prometheus
A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle.
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.
- Published: 1 May 2003
- ISBN: 9780141439471
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $23.00
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About the author
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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Praise for Frankenstein
A haunting, melancholy work of gothic beauty
Independent
The most famous of all horror stories still packs a punch
Daily Mail
A masterpiece
Phillip Pullman
Frankenstein launched an entire genre of dystopian fiction, and a legacy of horror at the consequences of unbridled experimentation
Daily Telegraph
Shelley’s speechifying, lonely, Miltonic monster remains one of the greatest characters in all of literature… The book may also be the greatest meditation on birth I have ever read.
Siri Hustvedt, The Week