Frankenstein – Introduction and Table of Contents
Frankenstein is a short novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It was first published in 1818 by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, and is both a horror story and a work of science fiction. In fact, some people consider Frankenstein broke new ground by becoming the first science fiction novel.
Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. While still young, she met the poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley during a visit to Scotland, shortly before he became estranged from his wife. The two began having clandestine meetings over her mother’s grave at St Pancras Old Church in London. By this time, Shelley was 21, while Mary was just 16.
On 26 June 1814, they went public with their relationship. One month later, they eloped to France, taking Mary’s stepsister (Claire Clairmont) with them. They then began travelling Europe together.
In June 1816; during a stay at the Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland; they met Lord Byron, who was exploring Europe with his personal physician Dr. John William Polidori. When the weather became too poor to venture out of the villa, they amused themselves by reading ghost stories.
One evening, after reading from a book of German ghost tales, Byron suggested they all attempt to write similar stories of their own. This proved to be easier said than done.
Byron began to write a ghost story but never finished it. Shelley also wrote a fragment of a ghost story and was less than pleased with the results. It’s unclear whether Clairmont was inspired to write a story but Polidori read Byron’s Fragment, drew inspiration from it, and wrote The Vampyre, a story that is often anthologized to this day.
As for Mary, she initially struggled to find an idea. Each morning when she was asked if she’d started a story, she had to admit she hadn’t. Then, one night during a bad thunderstorm, she had a vision-like experience that set the creative gears in her mind working.
She details the experience in the introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel:
“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. … He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
The experience terrified her and she reasoned it had the potential to terrify others as well. Now, more than two centuries later, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still continues to send shivers down the spines of readers all over the world and ranks among the the greatest works of speculative fiction.
Table of Contents
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