The original 1818 text

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, has inspired countless adaptations, imitations, and homages over the two centuries since its writing.

In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.