Frankenstein

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

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‘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…’

Victor Frankenstein’s monster is stitched together from the limbs of the dead, taken from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughter-house’. The result is a grotesque being who, rejected by his maker and starved of human companionship, sets out on a journey to seek his revenge. In the most famous gothic horror story ever told, Shelley confronts the limitations of science, the nature of human cruelty and the pathway to forgiveness.

Begun when Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old and published two years later, this chilling tale of a young scientist’s desire to create life – and the consequences of that creation – still resonates today.

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in 1797. Her mother was the famous feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, and through her parents she moved in the intellectual and literary circles of her time. She was a prolific writer, well-remembered today through the legacy of her Gothic novel, Frankenstein, widely considered the first of its genre.