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Frankenstein

Or The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley

$26.95   $24.32

Paperback

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English
Vintage Books
02 December 2025
The most famous horror story in world literature-the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster-is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.

No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), Mary Shelley produced English Romanticism's finest prose fiction.
By:  
Imprint:   Vintage Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 132mm,  Spine: 17mm
Weight:   264g
ISBN:   9780307743312
ISBN 10:   0307743314
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Postponed Indefinitley

MARY SHELLEY was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797 in London, the daughter of William Godwin, a radical philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As a teenager, she eloped to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on Frankenstein in 1816 in Switzerland, while they were staying with Lord Byron, and it was published in 1818 to immediate acclaim. She died in London in 1851.

Reviews for Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century Gothicism. While stay-ing in the Swiss Alps in 1816 with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, Mary, then eighteen, began to concoct the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster he brings to life by electricity. Written in a time of great personal tragedy, it is a subversive and morbid story warning against the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. Packed with allusions and literary references, it is also one of the best thrillers ever written. Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus was an instant bestseller on publication in 1818. The prototype of the science fiction novel, it has spawned countless imitations and adaptations but retains its original power. This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by Wendy Steiner, the chair of the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Scandal of Pleasure. Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 in London. She eloped to France with Shelley, whom she married in 1816. After Frankenstein, she wrote several novels, including Valperga and Falkner, and edited editions of the poetry of Shelley, who had died in 1822. Mary Shelley died in London in 1851.


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