New York, NY: Penguin Classics (2014)

Hardback in linen cloth.

New.

Mary Shelley’s haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok—now in a stunning clothbound edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. This chilling gothic tale, begun when Mary Shelley was just nineteen years old, would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

This edition also includes ‘A Fragment’ by Lord Byron and ‘The Vampyre: A Tale’ by John Polidori, as well as an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle.

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, famous radical writers of the day. In 1814, she met and soon fell in love with the then-unknown Percy Bysshe Shelley. In December 1816, after Shelley's first wife committed suicide, Mary and Percy married. They lived in Italy from 1818 until 1822, when Percy drowned, whereupon Mary returned to London to live as a professional writer of novels, stories, and essays until her death in 1851.