num_pages: 324
description: To many readers, who have perhaps known Frankenstein only at second hand, the original may well come as a surprise. When Mary Shelley began it, she was only 18, though she was already Shelley's mistress and Byron's friend. In her preface she explains how she and Shelley spent part of a wet summer with Byron in Switzerland, amusing themselves by reading and writing ghost stories. Her contribution was Frankenstein, a story about a student of natural philosophy who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from bones he has collected in charnel-houses. The story is not a study of the macabre, as such, but rather a study of how man uses his power, through science, to manipulate and pervert his own destiny, and this makes it a profoundly disturbing book.
language: English
title: Frankenstein
titlecomplete: Frankenstein
characters: Felix, Justine Moritz, Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein, William Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza, Henry Clerval, Safie, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, Ernest Frankenstein, Alphonse Frankenstein, De Lacey, Agatha, The Monster (Frankenstein)
genres: Fiction, Classics, Gothic, Science Fiction, Read For School, Horror, Fantasy, Literature, Novels, School
ratings_count: 1519035
places: Ingolstadt, Switzerland, Germany, Geneva, Arctic Circle
publisher: Oxford University Press