Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.
Mary Shelley
1797–1851
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at eighteen and spent the rest of her life working in the shadow of that strange, cold, luminous book. Her short fiction shares its weather: guilt, longing, people who reach for more than they can hold. Start with Frankenstein if you want the long plunge, or with Short Fiction if you want the same fierce eye in small, sharp doses. Set aside the film image of a lumbering monster; the book is quieter, more human, and more unsettling.
Feels like dread, wonder and melancholy.
Start with Frankenstein.
Shelley began the story at eighteen, during the rainy summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron proposed a ghost-story contest. The first edition in 1818 was published anonymously.
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans. Books by Mary Shelley
Short Fiction
Mary Shelley, 1829
Mary Shelley's short stories: revenge, shipwrecks, immortals and social climbers—gothic invention in miniature, with the same fierce eye for guilt and longing as Frankenstein.
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