Frankenstein and Collected Stories

Victor Frankenstein, a passionate student of “natural philosophy”, discovers the secret of life. With visions of creating a new and noble race, Victor puts his knowledge to work. But when he animates his first creature, its appearance is so shocking he abandons it. Victor believes the monster has vanished for good, but several months later he receives news that his younger brother has been murdered.

Mary Shelley’s classic gothic horror novel is here presented in the popular 1831 version as revised by the author.

While celebrated for her novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley also wrote a number of short stories, producing the majority of her short fiction for publication in The Keepsake, a popular annual. Most of the stories deal with love and romance originally aimed at a mainly female readership. Marked by their ingenuity, wit and humour, they vary from wryly ironic critiques of Italian marriage customs, parodies of Gothic literature, to reworkings of the conventions of science fiction and the fantastic.