Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's
About the Story
English author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797-1851) published her most famous novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus anonymously in 1818. As a Gothic horror novel, Frankenstein is now considered to be one of the first examples of science fiction. Shelley wrote the story while visiting the English Romantic poet Lord Byron in Lake Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 1816. Byron proposed that each of his guests write a ghost story. Shelley reportedly based her story on a dream she had about a scientist who created life and was horrified at his creation. Originally intended to be a short story, Shelley expanded it into a novel at the urging of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who later became her husband. Today, many mistake the name Frankenstein as referring to the monster, but Frankenstein actually refers to Victor Frankenstein, the ambitious scientist who creates a man from the body parts of corpses. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein never names his creation and only refers to it as a monster, creature, devil, fiend, wretch, and demon.
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