Frankenstein

Frankenstein Review

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen, responding to a ghost story challenge at the Villa Diodati during the volcanic summer of 1816 — eerie overcast skies across Europe gave the young novelist exactly the atmosphere her imagination required.

The subtitle — The Modern Prometheus — announces the novel’s ambition. Like the Titan who stole fire from the gods, Victor Frankenstein transgresses the boundaries of natural knowledge to create life. And like Prometheus, he is punished endlessly for his transgression. But Shelley is far more interested in the created than the creator.

Victor spends years in obsessive pursuit of the secret of life, assembles his creature from charnel houses and dissection rooms, and one November night succeeds in animating it. His immediate response — horror at what he has made — is the novel’s moral hinge. He runs. He abandons the Creature entirely.

This abandonment is the actual crime at the novel’s centre. The Creature — intelligent, sensitive, acutely capable of suffering — is left to make his own way in a world that responds to his appearance with terror and violence. He educates himself by secretly observing a family for months, learning language and human connection from a distance. He reaches out to them and is beaten away.

The novel’s most powerful section is the Creature’s extended testimony in the Alps, delivered directly to Frankenstein. It is the voice of someone made conscious and then abandoned to consciousness without support or love. His demand for a companion who shares his condition is not monstrous but entirely human — and Frankenstein’s destruction of the half-made female creature is an act of cruelty dressed as ethical precaution.

Our rating: 4.8/5 — The mother of science fiction and the most ethically urgent horror novel in the language.

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The Villa Diodati and the Ghost Story Challenge

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein during the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, where she was staying with Percy Bysshe Shelley (whom she would marry in December of that year), Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori. The summer was the “Year Without a Summer” caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora — volcanic ash in the atmosphere created eerie, overcast skies across Europe, temperatures dropped, and the unusual atmospheric conditions kept the group largely indoors. Byron proposed a ghost story challenge; the others attempted one.

Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 — her mother was the pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after giving birth to her — was eighteen when she began the novel. She completed and published it in 1818, originally anonymously; early readers, noting the dedication to her father William Godwin, assumed it was written by a man. The 1823 second edition was the first to bear her name.

The Creature as the Novel’s True Subject

Victor Frankenstein is one of literature’s most consistently unsympathetic protagonists — self-pitying, irresponsible, more concerned with his own suffering than with the being whose suffering he caused. But this is the novel’s design rather than its failure. Victor’s unsympatheticness is the measure of his crime. He created life, was horrified by it, ran away, and spent the rest of the novel bewailing his fate while the being he abandoned paid the full cost.

The Creature — who teaches himself to read, who observes a family for months learning what human connection looks and feels like before attempting it, who reaches out for connection and is beaten away, and who responds to rejection with escalating desperation rather than innate malevolence — is the novel’s genuine moral center. His extended testimony in the Alps, delivered directly to Frankenstein, is the voice of someone made conscious and then abandoned to consciousness without support, and it remains one of literature’s most devastating first-person arguments.

The Questions Frankenstein Is Still Asking

The ethical questions Shelley posed in 1818 have not been resolved in the intervening two centuries; they have intensified. What does a creator owe the created? What moral responsibilities does the scientist bear for what their science produces? What are the consequences of ambition pursued without ethical constraint? These questions, live at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, are more urgently live now — in the context of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the broad front of technologies whose consequences exceed their creators’ foresight — than they were when Shelley wrote them. This is what it means to invent a genre: to pose questions that remain open long enough to organize the thinking of every generation that follows.

The Ghost-Story Wager

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) grew out of the famous ghost-story contest at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, where the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Byron and John Polidori challenged one another to write a tale of terror. Published anonymously two years later, the novel’s frame narrative and its central confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and the creature he abandons established a template for science fiction and a permanent myth about the responsibilities of the maker toward the made.