Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is Mary Shelley's novel of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who assembles and animates a living being from dead tissue, then recoils from and abandons his own creation, setting in motion the tragedy that follows. Shelley conceived the story in the summer of 1816 near Geneva, during a ghost-story-writing contest proposed by Lord Byron; she was twenty when the novel was published anonymously two years later. Because its horror is grounded in the real scientific debates of its day over galvanism and the reanimation of dead matter, rather than in supernatural causes, scholars including Brian Aldiss have credited the novel as the first true work of science fiction as well as a landmark of Gothic fiction.
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What happened that led Mary Shelley to begin Frankenstein?
It began as a ghost story contest proposed by Lord Byron in Switzerland in 1816, and a waking vision supplied the opening idea.
In the summer of 1816 Mary Shelley was in Switzerland, near Lord Byron. The summer turned wet and unpleasant, and incessant rain kept the party indoors. They read volumes of German ghost stories translated into French, and Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. Shelley says in her 1831 introduction that for days she had no idea for one, until a waking vision of a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the hideous thing he had put together gave her the beginning of the tale.
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Widely credited, including by scholar Brian Aldiss, as the first true science fiction novel.
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1. Open Library: Frankenstein
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English language, juvenile literature
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Norton Anthology of World Literature
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Frankenstein (Wikipedia)
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the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 Gothic novel written by English author Mary Shelley.
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