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  • Published: 1 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9780451532244
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $19.99

Frankenstein

Or The Modern Prometheus




The most famous horror story in world literature—the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster—is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.

More than 200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece—a classic work of horror that blurs the line between man and monster.

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread. On a more profound level, it illuminates the triumph and tragedy of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a creature tortured by the solitude of a world in which he does not belong. A novel of almost hallucinatory intensity, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination. 
 

With an Introduction by Douglas Clegg
And an Afterword by Harold Bloom

  • Published: 1 October 2013
  • ISBN: 9780451532244
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $19.99

Other books in the series

Russian Thinkers
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
When You Are Old
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Venus in Furs
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, the daughter of two of the era’s most radical writers: William Godwin, the anarchist utopian, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from the childbirth. After a difficult childhood under a demanding stepmother, she ran off to the Continent at age 17 with her father’s wealthy—and married—benefactor, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, although they did not get married until the suicide of Shelley’s wife two years later. Despite close intellectual bonds the marriage was unhappy, due to Percy Shelley’s regular campaigning for open “utopian” sexual relationships (with her sister, for one), and the deaths of three out of their four children. In 1817, while visiting Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, the three challenged one another to write a horror story. The result from Mary was the novel Frankenstein, an instant popular (although not critical) success. Four years later her peripatetic husband drowned in a boating accident. Mary Shelley never remarried, but she continued on as a successful writer until her death in London in 1851.

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Praise for Frankenstein