Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus by Shelley, Mary

NOW A NETFLIX FILM - The most famous horror story in world literature--the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster--is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.

Features a New Introduction by Jeanette Winterson

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.

Author: Mary Shelley
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780307743312
Age Range: 18-UP

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2025 pg. 56

About the Author
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 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As a teenager, she eloped to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on Frankenstein 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.

About the Introducer: JEANETTE WINTERSON was born in Manchester, England. After graduating from Oxford University she published her first novel at age 25, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, to widespread acclaim and a BAFTA for her BBC TV adaption. She has written ten novels for adults, as well as children's books, non-fiction, and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.