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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407074290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Frankenstein

Or The Modern Prometheus




One of the greatest horror stories ever written - a scientist's quest to create life has nightmarish consequences that threaten everything he holds dear.

'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.

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407074290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Other books in the series

A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Love
Annals
Selected Poems
Military Dispatches

About the author

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, famous radical writers of the day. Mary’s mother died tragically ten days after the birth. Under Godwin’s conscientious and expert tuition, Mary’s was an intellectually stimulating childhood, though she often felt misunderstood by her stepmother and neglected by her father. In 1814 she met and soon fell in love with the then unknown Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in July they eloped to the Continent. In December 1816, after Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, committed suicide, Mary and Percy married. Of the four children she bore Shelley, only Percy Florence survived. They lived in Italy from 1818 until 1822, when Shelley drowned following the sinking of his boat Ariel in a storm. Mary returned with Percy Florence to London, where she continued to live as a professional writer until her death in 1851.
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

A masterpiece

Philip Pullman

More relevant today than ever

Benjamin Zephaniah

One of the most original and complete productions of the day

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion

Mary Shelley