Mary Shelley is best known for her famous horror novel Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus. It first appeared in 1818, creating an immediate sensation. Frankenstein enjoyed immediate popularity upon its publication, and has inspired many imitations and versions, including many film versions in the 20th century. The story deals with an ambitious young scientist. He creates life but then rejects his creation, a monster.In her childhood Mary Shelley was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle. She published her first poem at the age of ten. At the age of 16 she ran away to France and Switzerland with the poet Percy Shelley. They married in 1816 after Shelley's first wife had committed suicide by drowning. Their first child, a daughter, died in Venice, Italy, a few years later. In HISTORY OF SIX WEEKS TOUR (1817) the Shelley's jointly recorded their life. Thereafter they returned to England and Mary gave birth to a son, William.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus is the most famous novel by Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The novel was immediately enormously successful, spawning a stage production that made Frankenstein's creation - the so-called monster' - mute for the first but not only time.
The novel was published initially in 1818.
This is the more polished 1831 edition, which is the most common edition of the text.
The original is a masterpiece of Gothic literature however. An explorer, Walton, who writes the story in letters home, narrates it.
However, the bulk of the story is told by Victor Frankenstein who narrates his own creation of a man from bones he has stolen and with the power of electricity. In the centre of the concentric circles of narrative is the creature himself, by far the most sympathetic of the narrators, who is forced by an unsympathetic world to acts of violence and cruelty and finally the murder of Frankenstein's wife when the father' refuses to create a companion for the creature.