About the work
Frankenstein is the first novel by the English writer Mary Shelley; it was published in London on 1 January 1818, initially without the author's name and in three volumes, under the full original title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It grew out of the rain-soaked summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron proposed that each of his guests, among them Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori, should write a ghost story; the then 18-year-old Mary Godwin later expanded her idea into a novel. In 1831 she published a thoroughly revised edition with a new autobiographical introduction.
Plot
In letters to his sister, the polar explorer Robert Walton describes how his expedition, stuck in the Arctic ice, takes in the exhausted Victor Frankenstein, who then tells him the story of his life. As a student in Ingolstadt, Victor has brought a living being into existence and, horrified by its appearance, abandoned it. The nameless creature secretly teaches itself language and learning, but is met with revulsion wherever it goes and demands that its maker build it a companion; when Victor destroys her before she is complete, the creature takes revenge on those closest to him, among them his friend Henry Clerval and his newly wedded wife Elizabeth. Victor pursues his creation into the Arctic ice, where he dies.
Cultural significance
The novel combines Gothic fiction with Romantic themes and is regarded as one of the first science fiction novels; at its heart lies a creator's responsibility for what he brings into the world. As early as 1823, Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein opened at the English Opera House in London as the first stage adaptation, and its success helped to make the novel better known. Since then the story has been adapted many times for stage and screen, and Frankenstein's creature has become an icon of popular culture; the first German translation appeared in 1912.