Product Description

Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13049 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

About the Author
Mary Shelley was born in 1797, the only daughter of writers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. In 1814 she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married in 1816. She is best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, but she wrote several other works, including Valperga and The Last Man. She died in 1851. Maurice Hindle studied at the universities of Keele, Durham and Essex, gaining a Ph.D. in Literature from Essex in 1989. He currently teaches at the Open University.

Customer Reviews

First Among Monsters
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is at once firmly in the tradition of the Gothic genre that was so popular in the eighteenth century, and one of the first of the science fiction genre that was to become so important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It remains one of the defining works of both genres. The mad scientist, tampering with Nature with disastrous results, has become a stock character of SciFi/horror. As for the Monster itself, only Dracula rivals him as a horror icon. So the novel is important for its place in literary history, but does it still stand up on its own merits as an individual work?

The first thing to say is that it is not the story you know from the Hollywood versions. The scientist is called Frankenstein and he created a man; the similarity ends there. All the details are different. The novel is a strange, obsessive tale, complex in structure and rich in psychological symbolism. The real, underlying themes are incest, sibling rivalry and the self-destructive power of guilt. I will refrain from further comment on the story itself, because you are better coming to it fresh and letting it unfold.

The author's style is always competent, often elegent, but never sublime. She is not the poet of the family. We are offered lengthy word-portraits of Alpine landscapes that are clearly intended to transport the reader but in fact leave you prosaicly in place.

Not in the first rank of literature therefore, but so strikingly imaginative and replete with such memorable imagery that it is still worth reading.

Think you know Frankenstein? Probably not.
I know many other reviews have probably pointed this out, but Frankenstein is usually the subject of a common misconception, in that Frankenstein is not the creature's name, it is his creators surname. The creature does not in fact have a name (I call him creature for lack of a better word), and throughout the novel is de-humanised and debased as he is refered to as a monster. He is the unknown and the misunderstood and is therefore shunned from society and everything that is considered normal.
This is the classic novel of one man, and his quest for knowledge. This quest leads to him bestowing life upon an inanimate being; something which he deeply regrets as soon as he has accomplished it. It is the product of Victor Frankenstein's own creation that eats away at him and ultimately destroys him.
The novel reads as a warning against the accomplishments of scientific experimentation, which, in Shelley's day, would have been deeply shocking to the reader. Nowadays, it is much more difficult to shock, but this novel remains a classic. It is unfortunate that the 'legend' of Frankenstein has been so altered by many different adaptations over the years, as the original story is one that forces the reader to consider the moral aspect and the humanity of the 'monster.' It is not just another horror story.

Not what I was expecting
Anyone who thought that Frankenstein was the tall, slow, bolt-headed monster from the films will be very surprised by this gothic/horror story.
But, hopefully, like me, you will be pleasantly surprised. The story is about a young scientist named Frankenstein who becomes interested in creating life. He attempts to make a man out of acquired body parts. The result is a large, disfigured man. This "monster" is actually a sensitive and real human being. It is only after rejection by his creator that he starts to become more of a monster figure. 'Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned, and kicked, and trampled on.' This is the thought process that comes from rejection leads to the monstrous image. Although, I will not elaborate on this as it would spoil the story.
However, I will say that the key ideas in the book are definitely to do with how much power man should have and the problems caused by man's egotistical nature. If you do decide to read this book I am sure you will find that it is far more than a gothic tale or a horror story. It is infact more again to a heartbreaking tragedy.