Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus opens with letters to a sister in England from a traveller preparing to venture into the far north. Where she foresees danger, he imagines beauty, wonder and discoveries beyond the known world. His confidence gives the opening a sense of promise shadowed by unease.

Elsewhere, a voice recalls the earliest confusion of existence: light and darkness, hunger and thirst, and the slow work of distinguishing one sensation from another. Set beside the traveller’s grand hopes, this intimate account gives Shelley’s gothic fiction a striking contrast of scale. The novel brings imagined horizons and immediate bodily need into a world where solitude is frightening and powerful feelings can sustain as well as torment.