Title : The Original Frankenstein
Author : Mary W. Shelley
Editor : Charles E. Robinson
Collaborator : Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher : Vintage Classics
Pages : 464
Price : $ 12.24
ISBN :10: 0307474429
On a miserably rainy night in June 1816, a group of friends and lovers huddled around the fireplace in their rented villa near Lake Geneva, telling ghost stories and challenging each other to write frightening tales of their own. From that evening came perhaps the most famous horror story of all time: Frankenstein, published 200 years ago this month.
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was far from the most famous writer around that fire; she was, at the time, 19-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of the early feminist and writer Mary Wollstonecraft. She had become notorious by running off to the Continent with then-married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and having a child with him.
Her eventual book, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was turned down by two publishers before Lackington's, described by biographer Charlotte Gordon as 'an undistinguished house with a list of hack writers', agreed to a small print run, released on New Year's Day of 1818.
Critics were angered by the book, published anonymously, and decried its author as an atheist. Though Frankenstein was republished twice in her lifetime (in 1822 and, heavily revised, in 1831), Mary Shelley never earned royalties from it.
Penguin Classics has reissued Frankenstein: The 1818 Text in paperback, with a new introduction by Gordon. And Liveright Publishing has issued a handsome coffee-table-worthy edition of The New Annotated Frankenstein, complete with numerous notes and illustrations.
The great horror filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, in an introduction to the annotated version, draws a comparison between Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters (one of whom, Emily, was born 200 years ago this year). "I would love to travel back to contemplate life with these remarkable women", he writes.
Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
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