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  • Published: 30 September 2003
  • ISBN: 9780553898033
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

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.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”

A summer evening’s ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine room, and a runaway imagination—fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly about science, galvanism, and the origins of life—conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Written in 1816, when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley’s novel of “The Modern Prometheus” chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.

  • Published: 30 September 2003
  • ISBN: 9780553898033
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Sanshiro
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Mary Shelley

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.

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