Frankenstein

The English author Mary Shelley published the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. She began writing it at eighteen; the first edition appeared in London on 1 January 1818 without her name, when she was twenty, and her name did not appear until a French translation in 1821. Its central figure is Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who builds a living, thinking creature out of assembled body parts.

Victor is born in Naples in the late eighteenth century, into a wealthy Genevese family, and his youth is spent obsessed with alchemy before he develops an interest in chemistry and electricity. Caroline, his mother, dies of scarlet fever, and after that he leaves home for the University of Ingolstadt, where he works out how to give life to dead matter. He assembles a man, succeeds, and is so horrified by what he has done that he walks away from it.

The creature learns language and history by watching a family through a gap in their wall, and works out what he is: strong, hideous and completely alone, with a maker who will not speak to him. He asks first for conversation and then for a companion, and the refusal of the second request is what turns him against his creator. The novel is told in letters and in the creature's own account, so the person who suffers most is also the one who explains himself.

Shelley wrote the story while travelling in Europe and staying near Geneva, and the landscape is part of the book. It is a standalone novel, and it is one of the founding texts of science fiction as well as of Gothic horror.