About the author
Mary Shelley was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and editor. Frankenstein, written while she was still a teenager, joined Gothic fiction to questions of scientific responsibility, abandonment, education, and the human need for recognition.
Mary Shelley's structure is a set of nested confessions: an Arctic explorer's letters home, Victor's own account, and, at the center, the creature's. The middle section, in which the creature tells his own story, is the novel's moral engine. He is eloquent, reasoning, and capable of great tenderness — and of terrible revenge when every door to human society is shut in his face.
Where to start
Start with Frankenstein. A student builds a living creature from dead matter, then abandons it — with consequences that hunt him to the ends of the earth.
