Frankenstein
Victor Frankenstein builds a living man out of dead material, looks at what he has made, and runs. Everything after that comes from the running away rather than from the experiment.
The creature teaches himself to speak by watching a family through a gap in a wall, works out exactly what was done to him, and comes back with an argument. He wants a companion. He is refused. Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began it, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva where Byron had proposed that the household write ghost stories, and she handed her monster the better half of every debate in the book. Two versions circulate, by the way. The 1831 revision is markedly more fatalistic than the 1818 original, and the difference is not cosmetic.
About the Author
Was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and died eleven days after the birth, and William Godwin, the philosopher who then raised her on his library. She ran away with Percy Shelley at sixteen, while he was…
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