In the Library
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 28
- Length
- Length 75k words
Read in the app, yours for good.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's scholar reaches for forbidden knowledge too, but gets a second chance Frankenstein never earns.
£1.99
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson runs a similar experiment in science creating a danger beyond its maker's control, but frames it as a mystery pieced together by lawyers and friends, not confession.
£1.99
About the book
On a dreary night of November, a being's dull yellow eye opens for the first time, and the man who built it bolts from the room in terror of his own success. Everything in Mary Shelley's novel turns on that flight. Begun when she was eighteen, during a rain-locked Geneva summer where Byron had set ghost stories as a parlour game, Frankenstein outgrew the competition and became the first true work of science fiction. Its creature is no lurching brute: he teaches himself to read from Milton and Plutarch and Goethe, reasons his way to a full understanding of how completely he has been cast out of human warmth, and asks Victor for one thing only, a companion made like himself. The terror here is not the stitched body on the table. It is the maker who gives a creature a mind and then refuses to answer for the loneliness he has made.