Book description
With an essay by Paul Cantor.
'Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such
loathsome, yet appalling hideousness'
A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic
tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all.
It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to
create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched
creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a
nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave
birth to the modern science fiction novel.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of the philosopher William
Godwin, who disowned her when she eloped with the married man and poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley. They married after the suicide of his first wife.
It was their friend Lord Byron, with whom the couple spent a summer in
Switzerland, who suggested that she and Percy each write a horror story.
Frankenstein
was the result, inspired by a nightmare Shelley had when she was
eighteen years old and published by the time she was twenty-one.
