Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, when she was twenty years old. The novel grew out of a ghost-story competition among Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician during the unusually cold summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, a summer of crop failures caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora. Victor Frankenstein is a Swiss student of natural philosophy who, obsessed with the origins of life, assembles a creature from corpse parts and animates it through means the novel deliberately leaves vague. The creature's appearance horrifies him; he abandons it immediately. The creature teaches itself to read, discovers its own origins in Frankenstein's journal, and eventually turns to systematic destruction when its requests for companionship are denied.
The structure of the novel, narrators nested inside narrators, each one unreliable in different ways, prevents readers from settling comfortably into either Frankenstein's perspective or the creature's. Victor is articulate, self-pitying, and consistently frames his own choices as tragic inevitabilities. The creature's account of its own development presents a being that is rational, emotionally complex, and capable of learning, a being whose violence is a response to specific, traceable actions rather than an expression of innate evil. Shelley does not simply reverse the moral hierarchy: she builds a novel where both figures are damaged, where the original act of abandonment ramifies outward to destroy everyone connected to Frankenstein, and where the question of responsibility is genuinely difficult to distribute cleanly.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein at a moment when the Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain's economy and the boundaries of what technology could accomplish were being renegotiated in real time. Her question, what obligations does a creator incur toward the thing it creates, and what happens when those obligations are evaded, is now being asked about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies whose consequences remain partially unknown. The novel does not answer the question, but it constructs the terms with unusual clarity: the problem is not creation itself but the refusal of responsibility that follows it.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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