"Frankestein" Mary Shelley. This passage then is the beginning of the monsters narrative, and in it he recalls what he calls the original era of my being, explaining how he first became aware of his existence. The reader is presente

The first 200 words of this essay...

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley (1818)

Background

The daughter of the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley had a considerable output in her own right, as a novelist, dramatist, essayist and travel writer. Having married the renowned Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, Mary Shelley spent the summer in Switzerland in the company of a circle of Romantic writers that included Lord Byron. During this stay she conceived a story that she would later expand into the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

The novel relates the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist whose artificial life experiment creates an unnamed monster. The author employs an embedded narrative technique: the book purports to be a collection of letters written by Captain Robert Walton, who finds Frankenstein on a voyage to the Arctic. These letters include the story that Frankenstein tells him, and within this embedded narrative is a further embedded narrative, as Frankenstein recounts the story told by the monster. This extract, Chapter XI, is the monster's story.

Introduction

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (henceforth Frankenstein) has inspired so many imitative works that its two principal characters and the relationship almost