Frankenstein
Mary Shelley (1818)
“A teenage girl invented science fiction, the ethics of creation, and the monster who is more human than his creator — all in one novel.”
At a Glance
Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer, rescues Victor Frankenstein from the ice and records his story. Victor, a brilliant but reckless student, creates a living being from assembled corpse parts. The creature — rejected by Victor and by every human he encounters — turns to murder, demanding a companion. Victor refuses to make one, and the creature kills everyone Victor loves. Victor pursues his creation to the Arctic to destroy it, but dies first. The creature vanishes into the polar darkness to die alone.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Frankenstein is widely credited as the first work of science fiction — the first novel to use scientific premises rather than supernatural ones as the engine of its horror. Published in 1818 by an anonymous author (revealed to be the 20-year-old Mary Shelley in the second edition of 1823), it invented or anticipated virtually every major theme of the science fiction genre: the ethics of creation, artificial life, the hubris of scientific ambition, the social alienation of the constructed being. It has never been out of print.
Diction Profile
Formal, Latinate, and elevated throughout — but modulated across three distinct narrators whose prose registers encode their moral positions
High, drawn primarily from two sources: Milton's Paradise Lost (the Fall, Satan, Adam, the expulsion) and the Romantic sublime (mountains, glaciers, the Arctic as moral landscape). Secondary sources: Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch's Lives.