Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, 1818

Mary Shelley’s novel of Victor Frankenstein, a young Genevan scientist who gives life to a creature he has made from dead matter and then flees from it in horror, told through the letters of an Arctic explorer.

Start reading30 chapters, about 78,000 words

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Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Introduction to the 1831 edition of FrankensteinIn context
- Ideas
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
Introduction to the 1831 edition of FrankensteinIn context
- Fear
- Writing
Nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose,⁠—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Letter IIn context
- Motivation & Goals
What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?
Letter IIIIn context
- Courage
- Motivation & Goals
We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.
In context
- Friendship
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Chapter IVIn context
- Knowledge
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
Chapter IVIn context
- Life & Death
- Science
It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Chapter VIn context
- Life & Death
- Science
I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Chapter VIn context
- Emotion
- Failure
Live, and be happy, and make others so.
Chapter VIIIIn context
- Happiness
- Life & Death
All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?
Chapter XIn context
- Emotion
- Life & Death
Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Chapter XIn context
Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?
Chapter XVIn context
- Life & Death
- Philosophy
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.
Chapter XVIn context
- Beauty
- God
All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.
Chapter XVIIn context
- Anger
- Good & Evil
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
Chapter XXIn context
- Fear
- Power
My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.
Chapter XXIVIn context
- Love
I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?
Chapter XXIVIn context
- Justice
I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.
Chapter XXIVIn context
- Life & Death

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Contents