Mary Shelley Works

About Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is one of the first science fiction novels and one of the most philosophically enduring works in the English language — the story of Victor Frankenstein, who creates a living creature from assembled body parts and animates it with electricity, then abandons his creation in horror. Written when Shelley was eighteen years old, the novel explores ambition, isolation, the ethics of creation, and the Romantic question of what humanity owes to the beings it creates. Shelley also wrote The Last Man (1826) and the novella Mathilda.