- Published: 6 March 2006
- ISBN: 9780141914398
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 288
Frankenstein
Or The Modern Prometheus
'The mother of horror' Independent on Sunday
Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with the secret of resurrecting the dead. But when he makes a new 'man' out of plundered corpses, his hideous creation fills him disgust.
Rejected by all humanity, the creature sets out to destroy Frankenstein and everyone he loves. And as the monster gets ever closer to his maker, hunter becomes prey in a lethal chase that carries them to the very end of the earth.
- Published: 6 March 2006
- ISBN: 9780141914398
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 288
Other books in the series
About the author
The idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Godwin during a summer sojourn in 1816 with Percy Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron was also staying. She was inspired to begin her unique tale after Byron suggested a ghost story competition. Byron himself produced “A Fragment,” which later inspired his physician John Polidori to write The Vampyre. Mary completed her short story back in England, and it was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Among her other novels are The Last Man (1826), a dystopian story set in the twenty-first century, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). As well as contributing many stories and essays to publications such as the Keepsake and the Westminster Review, she wrote numerous biographical essays for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1835, 1838–39). Her other books include the first collected edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Works (4 vols., 1839) and a book based on the Continental travels she undertook with her son Percy Florence and his friends, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Mary Shelley died in London on February 1, 1851.
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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