Frankenstein

The Story

'I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts  kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I  saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and  then, on the working of some powerful engine, show  signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital  motion.' A summer evening's ghost stories,  lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a  runaway imagination--fired by philosophical  discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about  science, galvanism, and the origins of  life--conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting  night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of  her Romantic  masterpiece, Frankenstein. Written in 1816 when she was only  nineteen, Mary Shelley's novel of 'The Modern  Prometheus' chillingly dramatized the dangerous  potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A  frightening creation myth for our own time,  Frankenstein remains one of the greatest  horror stories ever written and is an undisputed  classic of its kind.