Frankenstein

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination--fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life--conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece,Frankenstein. Written in 1816 when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley's novel of "The Modern Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time,Frankensteinremains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.

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 <b>Vindication of the Rights of Woman</b>. She eloped to France with Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on <b>Frankenstein</b> 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.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>