Frankenstein

An English explorer, Walton, pushing for the North Pole, takes aboard a dying man pursuing something across the ice, and the man tells his story. Victor Frankenstein, a young Genevan student aflame with chemistry and ambition, assembled a creature from dead matter and brought it to life, then fled in horror at the sight of it. The creature, abandoned, teaches itself language and reading in hiding, is met everywhere with violence, and turns on its maker with terrible deliberation, killing Victor's young brother, his closest friend and finally his bride on their wedding night, after Victor destroys the companion he had promised to make. The chase ends in the Arctic, where the creature is last seen mourning over Victor's body before vanishing onto the ice.

The first surprise for readers who know only the films is that the creature speaks, eloquently and at length, and his account of his own education and rejection is the moral centre of the book. There is no lightning, no lumbering mute, no assistant; there is a nested set of narratives, Walton's letters around Victor's confession around the creature's autobiography, and a question the novel refuses to settle about which of the two is the monster. It is a young writer's book, feverish and sometimes overwrought, and it has outlived nearly everything written in its decade.

Mary Shelley began it at eighteen, in the wet summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, when Byron proposed that his guests each write a ghost story. It was published anonymously on the first day of 1818; she was twenty.