Title: Frankenstein Author: Mary Shelley Creation Date: 1818 Location: England Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Mary Shelley wrote the first draft of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, during the so-called Year Without a Summer produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies the year before. She was eighteen. The context matters: a young woman surrounded by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron's physician John Polidori, all of them caught indoors by relentless summer rain and ash-darkened skies, competing in a ghost-story contest while Europe was still digesting the wreckage of revolution and Napoleonic war and while the ambient discourse of the household ran on galvanism, natural philosophy, and Romantic excess. The novel was published anonymously in three volumes by the small London firm of Lackington in January 1818, with a preface by Percy Shelley that many readers took for the author's own. It was widely attributed to Percy or to other male hands until Mary Shelley's name appeared on the second edition in 1823. She revised the text significantly for the one-volume Bentley edition of 1831, adding a new author's introduction, softening some of the radicalism of the original, and giving Victor Frankenstein's downfall a more explicitly cautionary frame. Scholars continue to argue over which version to prefer.
The thematic core of Frankenstein is the question of responsibility — not merely the scientist's responsibility toward his creation, but the creation's claim on the world that made him. Victor Frankenstein assembles a being from charnel-house parts and then recoils from it the moment it lives, abandoning it without name, without instruction, without love. The creature's subsequent self-education — he learns language by covert observation, reads Milton and Plutarch and Goethe, develops an inner life of extraordinary richness — only deepens the cruelty of his maker's rejection. The novel is the creature's indictment as much as Victor's confession. Shelley holds both perspectives simultaneously, which is why the book has generated such sustained philosophical attention: it is not simply a cautionary tale about playing God, but a meditation on what we owe to consciousness once we have called it into being.
What makes Frankenstein canonical is precisely its ambivalence. It is simultaneously a Gothic novel, a Romantic prose poem, an indictment of male creative ego, a class analysis of who bears the costs of scientific ambition, and the founding document of science fiction. No single reading exhausts it. The creature's cry — "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on" — has resonated differently in every era since 1818, which is the test of a text that has genuinely entered the bloodstream of civilisation.
The Prohibition
The prohibitions Shelley wrote against were intellectual, sexual, and reputational, and they had been arranged around her since birth. She was the daughter of two of the most notorious radical writers in late-eighteenth-century England — William Godwin, the philosopher of Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — and her mother had died of puerperal fever ten days after Mary's birth in August 1797. The mother she never knew became, almost immediately, the subject of an early scandal of feminist authorship: Godwin published a memoir of his wife in 1798 that frankly described her love affairs, her suicide attempts, her unmarried motherhood, and her unconventional life, and the polite literary world responded by treating Wollstonecraft's name as a synonym for sexual disgrace. Mary Shelley grew up under this cloud. Her father's house was a site of pilgrimage for radical thinkers and an object of suspicion to everyone else. Her education was unusual for a girl of the period — Godwin made sure his daughter could read Latin and Greek and discuss philosophy — but the broader social world was prepared in advance to dismiss her as her mother's daughter.
The second prohibition was sexual. In 1814, at sixteen, Mary Godwin met the twenty-one-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married to Harriet Westbrook and had a child by her. Mary and Percy fell in love at her mother's grave in St Pancras churchyard, where Mary often went to read, and within weeks they had eloped to the Continent, taking Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont with them. The elopement scandalised London society, was treated by the popular press as confirmation of the worst stereotypes about the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and cost Mary her relationship with her father for years. By the time she sat down to write Frankenstein at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, she had already endured the death of a premature infant daughter the year before, was pregnant again with her son William, and was living openly with Percy Shelley as his unmarried partner — a sexual and social position for which the polite world had only one name.
The third prohibition was the prohibition of female intellectual authorship in genres considered serious. A young woman in Mary Shelley's position was not supposed to write a philosophical novel engaging the latest natural philosophy — Erasmus Darwin on the principle of life, Luigi Galvani on animal electricity, Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution — and was certainly not supposed to do so without obvious male authorship. When Frankenstein appeared anonymously in 1818, reviewers debated whether it had been written by Percy Shelley, William Godwin, or another male hand. The Quarterly Review found it "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity" and added that it could not have been written by a woman. When Mary Shelley's authorship became public, she was treated as a curious prodigy, never quite as the originator in her own right.
The Strategy
Shelley's strategy was to use the resources she had been given by accident of birth and to make a virtue of the very company that had compromised her reputation. The Diodati summer of 1816 was the strategic centre. Byron, who had rented the villa above Lake Geneva to escape the scandals that had ended his English life, proposed a ghost-story competition to amuse his guests during the rain-bound evenings; Mary, who had never written a sustained piece of fiction before, took the challenge with the seriousness of someone who had been listening to Percy and Byron and Polidori discuss galvanic experiments and the prospect of reanimating dead matter. Her famous waking dream, recounted years later in the 1831 introduction, gave her the central image of the scientist beside the body that opens its eyes. She began the book the next morning. The strategy was to write into the conversation the men around her had been having, but with a moral seriousness none of them had brought to it — to take their speculative excitement about creating life and to ask what such a creation, once it existed, would have the right to demand from its maker.
The second element of the strategy was anonymity, deployed not as concealment but as protection. Publishing Frankenstein anonymously and with Percy Shelley's preface gave Mary the freedom to write what she actually thought without having her sex made the entire subject of the reception. The convention of anonymous first publication was familiar in the period — Walter Scott had published Waverley anonymously in 1814 — and Mary used it for her own reasons. She wanted the book to be argued with on its own terms before being filed under the category of "novel by the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft". She was right to be cautious. If her name had been on the title page from the start, the hostility of the reception would have been concentrated on her person rather than dispersed across the text.
The third element was formal. Shelley chose to nest the narrative in three frames: Walton's letters from the Arctic to his sister in England, Victor Frankenstein's confession to Walton on the ice-bound ship, and the creature's autobiographical account delivered to Victor on the Mer de Glace. Each narrator is unreliable in his own way, each is given full opportunity to speak, and the reader is the only figure with access to all three perspectives. The structure is not just an aesthetic choice; it is the moral architecture of the novel. By giving the creature his own long first-person narration, set inside Victor's, Shelley refuses to let him remain the object of horror Victor has tried to reduce him to. He becomes a speaker, an arguer, a reader, a being who can demand to be answered. That was the strategy that turned a ghost-story contest into a novel with a future.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was paid in the years immediately surrounding the writing and in the long shadow that followed. By the time Frankenstein was published in January 1818, Mary Shelley had already buried her first daughter and was about to lose her son William and her daughter Clara within the next eighteen months — both children dying of fever during the Shelleys' wandering Italian residence, Clara in Venice in September 1818 and William in Rome in June 1819. Only her fourth child, Percy Florence Shelley, born in November 1819, would survive into adulthood. In July 1822, Percy Shelley drowned when his small sailing boat the Don Juan went down in a sudden squall in the Bay of Spezia. Mary was twenty-four. She returned to England with her one surviving child, dependent on a small allowance from Percy's father Sir Timothy Shelley, who granted it on condition that she not publish anything drawing attention to the Shelley name. She accepted the condition and spent the next decades editing Percy's poetic reputation and writing further novels — Valperga, The Last Man, Lodore, Falkner — that were respected but never matched the impact of Frankenstein.
The personal cost was the loss of three of her four children, the loss of her husband, the loss of her closest friends to early deaths in Italy, and the long widowhood spent rehabilitating Percy Shelley's reputation under the watchful disapproval of his father. She suffered frequent illness in her later years, was reportedly diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died in London in February 1851 at the age of fifty-three. She was buried at Bournemouth in a grave that holds also the remains of her parents, exhumed and reinterred with her by the surviving Percy Florence — a final reunion of the Wollstonecraft–Godwin household after half a century of separation.
The legacy is the entire genre of science fiction, and an enormous share of the modern imagination of what it means to create life through technology. Frankenstein invented the figure of the scientist whose ambition outruns his ethics — a figure that runs forward through H. G. Wells's Doctor Moreau, through every cinematic mad scientist of the twentieth century, through Blade Runner and Jurassic Park and the entire contemporary discussion of artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The creature, Shelley's most enduring creation, became a permanent inhabitant of Western iconography — though usually in a flattened form that erased the eloquent, Miltonic, philosophically literate being she had actually written. Twentieth-century criticism, especially feminist criticism beginning in the 1970s with Ellen Moers and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, recovered Shelley's authorship as a serious intellectual achievement and read the novel as among other things a meditation on the terror and the moral weight of giving birth — a reading rooted in the documented fact that Shelley had lost a baby the year before she wrote it. The book is now taught at every level of the university curriculum, from introductory survey courses to graduate seminars in bioethics.
The Reading
It begins on ice. Captain Robert Walton, a restless Englishman pursuing the geographic North Pole in search of glory and undiscovered country, writes letters to his sister Margaret Saville in England from a ship locked in Arctic pack near the boundary of the Russian Empire. He wants a friend, someone who shares his hunger for the sublime and the unknown. What he gets instead is a man dragged half-dead from the frozen sea: Victor Frankenstein, found pursuing a sledge that had vanished northward across the ice the day before Walton's crew rescued him. Walton nurses Victor back to enough coherence to speak, and Victor, recognising in Walton the same dangerous ambition that ruined him, decides to tell his story as a warning. The whole novel that follows is what Victor tells Walton on the ice-bound ship, transcribed by Walton into letters home.
Victor grows up in Geneva, the eldest son of a prosperous and loving family. His parents adopt an orphan girl, Elizabeth Lavenza, who becomes Victor's cherished companion and eventual betrothed. He has a devoted friend in Henry Clerval, a poet of sentiment and warmth, everything Victor will stop being. As a boy Victor reads the old alchemists — Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus — and grows inflamed by their ambitions to unlock the secrets of nature and death. When a thunderstorm destroys an oak with a bolt of lightning and a visiting natural philosopher explains electricity to him, something fuses in him that cannot be unfused. He is sent to the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria to complete a respectable scientific education, and there, under the encouragement of Professor Waldman, he discovers a corridor he cannot back out of.
Working in private, charnel houses and dissecting rooms his real laboratory, Victor solves the problem that all his predecessors failed to crack: he discovers the principle by which dead matter can be made to live. The discovery is conveyed obliquely, deliberately — the recipe is never given, because the recipe is not the point. What matters is the intoxication, the two years of obsessive solitary labour, the wilful self-blinding to consequence, the gradual narrowing of Victor's life until there is nothing in it but the work. He chooses parts from corpses with an eye to beauty and proportion. He sews them together in his rented attic above the streets of Ingolstadt. He works through nights, eats little, writes no letters home, and becomes for a stretch of months the kind of man whose entire moral universe has shrunk to a single project.
One November night, in the small hours, the creature opens dull yellow eyes. Victor looks at what he has made — eight feet tall, with skin the colour of old parchment, black lips, lustrous black hair, watery eyes that seem to fix on him — and is seized by a horror so total that he flees the room. He spends the night pacing the streets of Ingolstadt and hiding in his own courtyard, and in the morning Henry Clerval arrives unexpectedly from Geneva and finds him in a state of frantic illness. Victor collapses into months of fever and delirium. Clerval nurses him through it, and when Victor finally recovers there is a letter from Elizabeth — loving, concerned, full of domestic news — and the creature is not mentioned once. Victor chooses, consciously or not, to pretend the experiment has not happened. He returns slowly to his old self. He does not go back to the attic.
The creature, meanwhile, is alone in the world with no one to explain it to him. His early months are a painful education in sensation: cold, heat, hunger, light, the strange terrors of fire and the small pleasures of moonlight. He stumbles from Ingolstadt at random, surviving on berries and stream water, sleeping in the open. Eventually he finds a hovel attached to a peasant cottage in a wooded valley and shelters there through a winter, learning the family inside through observation. The De Laceys are an exiled French family living in Bavarian poverty: an old blind father, his son Felix, his daughter Agatha, and eventually a young woman named Safie who arrives from Constantinople and must be taught French from scratch. The creature teaches himself language alongside her, hidden in his den, listening through a chink in the wall. He learns to read from books he finds abandoned in the woods: Plutarch's Lives, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost. Werther teaches him passion and despair; Plutarch teaches him history and greatness; Milton teaches him the question he cannot stop asking — am I Adam, or am I Satan? Was I made to be loved, or was I made to be cast out?
When he finally understands enough of his own nature to attempt human contact, he reads Victor's journal, which he has found in the pocket of the coat he had taken from the laboratory the night of his birth, and the horror of his creation is laid bare to him in his maker's own writing. He resolves to seek out the De Lacey family as a bridge back to humanity. He waits until the others are out of the cottage and approaches the blind old father alone, makes his appeal in careful, well-formed sentences, and is heard with sympathy. Then Felix and Agatha and Safie return and see the enormous grey figure clutching their father's hand, and pandemonium breaks out. Felix beats him with a stick. The family flees the cottage within days and never returns. The creature, betrayed in the one experiment of human society he had been able to attempt, burns the cottage to the ground in the only act of destruction that makes complete emotional sense, and turns his face toward Geneva to find his maker.
On the road to Geneva, in a mountain forest, he encounters a small boy who, not yet old enough to have been taught fear, runs toward him openly until he shouts that his father is Alphonse Frankenstein, and the creature feels something close to joy curdle into calculation. He strangles William Frankenstein and plants a miniature portrait of Caroline Frankenstein, William's mother and Victor's, in the pocket of Justine Moritz, the family's young servant girl who had loved William. Justine is tried and convicted and hanged on the strength of the planted evidence and a confession extracted from her by a confessor who told her she could not be saved unless she admitted the murder. Victor knows she is innocent and cannot say a word in her defence without exposing himself as the cause of all of it. Elizabeth, who had loved Justine, collapses into grief. Victor retreats into the Alps in a half-suicidal wandering.
On the Mer de Glace, beneath Montanvert, the creature finds him. The confrontation is magnificent. The creature speaks with the full precision and force of a mind that has read widely and suffered deeply. He does not justify the murders so much as explain them as the logical consequence of Victor's desertion, and he makes his demand — not revenge, not acknowledgement, but companionship. Make me a mate, he says. Make me a female counterpart as hideous and outcast as myself, and we will leave Europe forever, we will go to the wildernesses of South America and survive on berries and acorns and trouble no one in the human world. Victor, standing on the glacier in the full presence of what he has done, agrees.
He travels with Clerval to England, ostensibly to acquire knowledge useful to his work, actually to build the female creature in the Orkney Islands where no one will observe him. He builds her in a stone cottage on a small island in the chain. Then, in the moment before completing the work, he looks out the window and sees the creature's face pressed against the glass, watching, waiting, and something breaks in Victor. He tears the unfinished female body apart with his own hands. He cannot let the creature breed. He cannot loose a race of monsters on the world. He cannot see his own act whole, because seeing it whole would mean acknowledging that the creature is right about everything.
The creature's response is controlled fury. He will have his revenge, and he has already chosen the currency: all of Victor's happiness, everyone Victor loves. He kills Clerval in Ireland, leaving the body on a beach where Victor will be brought to identify it, and Victor is briefly imprisoned for the murder — another grotesque irony — and released only when his father comes from Geneva to collect him. He returns to Switzerland and marries Elizabeth as he had long promised. On their wedding night, while Victor prowls the inn corridors with a pistol expecting an attack on himself, the creature finds Elizabeth alone in the bridal chamber and strangles her. Alphonse Frankenstein, already aged and weakened by grief, dies of the shock within days. Victor is now as alone in the world as the creature he had refused to console.
He dedicates himself to pursuit. He haunts the creature's trail south from Geneva toward the Mediterranean, then east through the Tartar steppes and the deserts of Russia, sustained by provisions the creature leaves deliberately on rocks and in caves — bread and a small store of dried meat, sometimes a message scratched into the bark of a tree, a single line of taunting Latin or French daring him to come further. The creature is drawing him on, leading him toward the cold, conducting him deliberately into the territory where neither of them can survive without the other. They run north at last across the ice, Victor driving a dogsled, the creature always pulling a little ahead, and it is in this chase that Walton's ship catches them. Walton's crew, frightened of the cold and of the becalming pack, have just begged their captain to turn the ship south as soon as the ice releases it; Walton is on the verge of agreeing when Victor finishes his story. When Victor dies on the ship the following morning, Walton goes to the cabin where he has laid the body and finds the creature already there, leaning over his dead creator and weeping in great groans that the English sailors who first see him through the doorway take for some kind of animal cry. The creature speaks. He is the most miserable of all living beings, he tells Walton. He will go north onto the ice and build himself a funeral pyre and burn himself to nothing. He will no longer torment the world with his presence. Walton watches him spring from the cabin window onto an ice raft and drift into the polar darkness. The ship turns at last for home, and Walton is left uncertain what he has witnessed or whom to believe.
The ice that surrounds Walton's ship is simultaneously real and metaphorical: it is the boundary where ambition meets its limit, the place where the world stops cooperating with the human will. Walton has sailed north to discover undiscovered country, driven by the same hunger for the sublime that drove Victor into his laboratory — and who has put his entire crew at risk to pursue a private vision of glory. Victor told him his story as a warning, and whether the warning arrives in time is a question that receives no answer. Victor's failure is not in creating life but in refusing to love what he created. The creature's murders are explicable, even comprehensible, without being forgivable. Walton is left holding both narratives and is the only one of the three who survives the encounter, and what he is to do with what he has heard is left entirely to him. He has sailed north in search of glory and instead has been handed a story about what glory costs the people it does not consider. Whether he goes on to repeat Victor's pattern in a smaller key or whether the encounter has actually warned him — that is the question the reader carries out into the cold, unanswered, holding the burden of two confessions and the silence of the ice.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Oxford World's Classics edition uses the original 1818 text — the version Mary Shelley first published, before her later revisions — with a full critical apparatus. The Penguin Classics edition is more affordable and widely available.
Oxford's definitive scholarly edition using the original 1818 text — with full critical apparatus and notes.
The Penguin Classics edition — affordable, widely available, and based on the 1818 text.
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