Frankenstein: the Original 1818 Text by Written by Mary Shelley in 1818, Frankenstein is one of the first works of science fiction and an early influence in the horror genre. The tale of a mad scientist and his monstrous creation explores themes of scientific responsibility, ambition, and free will.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (born August 30, 1797, London, England—died February 1, 1851, London) was an English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein.
The only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 and eloped with him to France in July 1814. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley’s first wife had committed suicide. After her husband’s death in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831), a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human being. (The man-made monster in this novel inspired a similar creature in numerous American horror films.)
She wrote several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837); The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.
Source: Britannica.com
