Frankenstein

Mary Shelley began this novel at eighteen; it appeared in 1818. The young scientist Victor Frankenstein discovers how to give life to dead matter and builds a man from corpses, then flees in horror from his creation. Abandoned, the creature teaches itself to speak and read, longs for love, meets only disgust, and turns its pain into vengeance on its maker.

Often called the first science-fiction novel and a founding work of horror, it asks a question that grows more urgent with every new technology: who is responsible for what we create? The creature itself has no name; Frankenstein is the scientist.

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the daughter of two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth, and the philosopher William Godwin. At sixteen she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at eighteen, during a rainy summer by Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, she began the story that became Frankenstein.

Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died young and Percy drowned in 1822. She supported herself by writing, edited her husband's poems and wrote The Last Man, an early novel of a worldwide plague. Her mother's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is also in the library.