Frankenstein is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Gothicism and the prototype of the twentieth-century science-fiction novel. It was conceived in the Swiss Alps in mid-June 1816 after a conversation about bringing corpses to life provoked a nightma...

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, wrote the first draft of "Frankenstein" after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost writing competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Returning to England in the autumn...