Frankenstein

The Original 1818 Text — Restored and Annotated by T.S. Causley

In the summer of 1816, a volcanic winter darkened Europe, and a nineteen-year-old woman trapped indoors by cold and rain wrote one of the most enduring novels in the English language. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is not the story most people think they know. There is no lumbering monster, no bolt-necked creature, and no simple battle between good and evil.

What Shelley created instead was a haunting and deeply human novel about ambition, responsibility, isolation, friendship, and the consequences of creation. This edition restores the original 1818 text, the version Shelley first published at the age of nineteen, and presents it with original scholarship by T.S. Causley, a registered professional archaeologist and art historian, whose historical and material culture approach brings fresh depth to Shelley’s Romantic masterpiece.

More than 70 original annotations provide historical, literary, scientific, and cultural context, illuminating the real places, ideas, discoveries, books, and events that shaped the novel and its world. Readers will encounter the science that inspired Victor Frankenstein’s experiments, the landscapes that carried him from Geneva to the Arctic, the literary works that influenced Shelley, and the enduring questions that have made Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus one of the most discussed novels ever written.

Read Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus as the Gothic masterpiece it is. Explore it as a product of the Romantic age. Encounter it as Shelley’s first readers did, in its original, unrevised form.

Includes: Original Editorial Introduction by T.S. Causley • 70+ Original Annotations • Curated Further Reading