Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

Sir Humphry Davy elaborated upon his chemical experiments; Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, visited with the Godwins and spoke of the goals of democracy. Mary was introduced to the painter Joseph Turner, the musician Muzio Clementi, and the revolutionaries Helen Maria Williams and Lady Mount Cashell. A bright child and voracious reader, she was inspired by what she heard, and she devoured an incredibly diverse selection of books. Her reading list for 1815, for example, lists seventy-six works—among them, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), D‘Israeli’s Despotism; or, The Fall of the Jesuits (1811), Robertson’s History of America (1777), Henri-Dietrich’s Systeme de la nature (in French; 1770), and her father’s Life of Chaucer (1803). It is no wonder that the monster’s seminal reading—Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, all three also on Mary’s 1815 list—are works spanning centuries, continents, and subject matter.
    Though Wollstonecraft and Godwin both wrote novels, their talents as fiction writers were greatly subordinate to their skills as philosophers and essayists. Mary’s reading lists indicate her interest in studying and exploring the literary arts, perhaps as her way of finding her own niche in this multitalented family. Like many young women her age, she particularly enjoyed the relatively new genre of Gothic literature: Before the age of twenty, she read Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Monk Lewis’s Tales of Terror (1799). As a teenager she also read Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1747), by Samuel Richardson, and several other epistolary novels, plus a number of the novels of sentiment by Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding. Meeting Percy Shelley in 1812 intensified her interest in poetry as well; in the years preceding the writing of Frankenstein, she pored through the collected works of many of the poets she had first encountered in her father’s study.
    By the time Mary reached age eighteen, then, she was very familiar with many of the philosophic, social, scientific, political, and literary issues of Romanticism, the first modern era. Though Frankenstein exhibits some of the problems of the shotgun approach to writing a book (the subplot involving Justine’s trial for murder, an obvious nod to Godwin’s Political Justice, seems disconnected and underdeveloped, while the attempts at poetic landscape description are often drawn out), the novel successfully synthesizes much of the knowledge and “spirit of the age” that informed her existence. By combining never-before-combined ingredients from her diverse readings, Shelley broke from established tradition and even concocted a new literary recipe known today as science fiction. Clearly, her intellectual inheritance and education had well prepared her to create a work as provocative and enduring as Frankenstein.

“... offspring of my happy days ...”
    But the creation of Frankenstein was also a matter of amazing and irre producible timing in terms of Shelley’s personal growth. When she picked up her pen in the summer of 1816, she was carrying a formidable load of psychic baggage along with that dense body of knowledge. By Mary’s early teens, strong tensions developed in her relationships with her father and stepmother, made visible by her rebellious behavior and terrible skin rashes. Her adoration of her father placed her in competition with her stepmother, and to keep peace Godwin shipped her off to boarding schools and foster homes in Scotland. Separated from her beloved yet domineering father for months at a time, Mary developed an independent spirit and creative receptivity that enabled her to elope with a married man in her sixteenth year.
    Percy Shelley was, of course, no ordinary lover. Handsome, charismatic, brilliant, and idealistic, the poet had been a guest at her father’s house many times and was greatly esteemed by