Frankenstein ebook
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Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron's.
About the Author:
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851), daughter of political radical William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, grew up among the leading voices of the Romantic movement. She met and wed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816. When the Shelleys spent that summer on Lake Geneva with friends—among them, Lord Byron—Byron challenged the writers to a ghost-story contest. Mary Shelley’s sketch inspired her novel Frankenstein (1818), influenced by her loss of her infant daughter in 1815. Four years after Frankenstein’s publication, her husband drowned. The tragedy haunted Shelley for the rest of her life, which she dedicated to annotating her husband’s writing, publishing her own novels, and revising Frankenstein for republication.
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, into a life of personal tragedy. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that summer traveled with him and a host of other Romantic intellectuals to Geneva. Her greatest achievement was piecing together one of the most terrifying and renowned stories of all time: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley said she conceived of Frankenstein in “a waking dream.” This vision was simply of a student kneeling before a corpse brought to life. Yet this tale of a mad creator and his abomination has inspired a multitude of storytellers and artists. She died on February 1, 1851.
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