Introduction

The young Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with the secret of life, gathers parts of corpses from graveyards and dissecting rooms and, on a dreary night in November, brings a huge human form to life by the power of science. But when the creature opens its dull yellow eye, he is horrified by its ugliness and flees, abandoning what he has made. The nameless 'monster' is born gentle and longs for love and understanding; hiding beside a cottage, it secretly learns to speak and read, and reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch, but its frightful appearance makes it feared and driven off by people everywhere. Loneliness and despair turn it to revenge, and it kills Frankenstein's brother, his friend and his bride. Creator and creature pursue each other to the last across the Arctic ice. Regarded as the beginning of science fiction, the novel still asks how humanity should treat the life it creates.