A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle.
Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the masterpieces of
nineteenth-century Gothicism. While stay-ing in the Swiss Alps in
1816 with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, Mary,
then eighteen, began to concoct the story of Dr. Victor
Frankenstein and the monster he brings to life by electricity.
Written in a time of great personal tragedy, it is a subversive and
morbid story warning against the dehumanization of art and the
corrupting influence of science. Packed with allusions and literary
references, it is also one of the best thrillers ever written.
Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus was an instant bestseller
on publication in 1818. The prototype of the science fiction novel,
it has spawned countless imitations and adaptations but retains its
original power.
This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by Wendy
Steiner, the chair of the English department at the University of
Pennsylvania and author of The Scandal of Pleasure.
Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 in London.
She eloped to France with Shelley, whom she married in 1816. After
Frankenstein, she wrote several novels, including Valperga and
Falkner, and edited editions of the poetry of Shelley, who had died
in 1822. Mary Shelley died in London in 1851.
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