Through a chink in the boards of a lean-to built against a cottage wall, a creature watches a family he has never met. There is a blind old man who plays a stringed instrument, a young woman who weeps when she thinks nobody can see her, and a young man who goes out each morning to cut wood. The family is poor, and the watcher has been stealing from their stores. Once he understands that, he stops, and begins to leave bundles of fuel by their door at night instead. The family wake to find the chore done and wonder aloud about a kindly spirit. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, this is the moment the reader’s sympathy changes sides, and it never entirely changes back.
Mary Shelley’s Creature Learns to Read
The novel spends its first third with Victor Frankenstein, and his account of the creature is all horror: a yellow eye opening, a grin at the bed curtain, a figure glimpsed on a mountainside. Then the creature is given his own long stretch of narration, and the book becomes something else. He describes his first days as pure sensation, light and cold and the shock of fire that warms the hand and then burns it. He learns birdsong before words. And he sees his face in a pool and recoils from it.
The education that follows is the finest passage in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A young Arabian woman arrives at the cottage, and the son of the family teaches her French from a history of the rise and fall of empires. The creature, listening in the dark, learns faster than she does. He discovers property, rank and family, and then the bleak arithmetic of his own position: no money, no friends, no kin. Later he finds a leather case abandoned in the woods holding Milton, Plutarch and Goethe’s Werther, and he reads Paradise Lost as a true history, casting himself first as Adam and then, more darkly, as Satan.
What makes this so moving is that the hunger is never for power. It is for conversation. When he finally works up the courage to approach the blind father alone, the scene is almost all dialogue and very hard to read, because the reader knows what eyes will do when they return.
The family he is watching have their own history, and it sharpens the point. The son once helped an unjustly condemned prisoner escape from a Paris jail, and the reward for that decency was the loss of everything: fortune, country and liberty. The creature takes in the story as a lesson about the world he has been born into, where goodness is no protection. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley keeps returning to that idea, in a courtroom, in a village, at a cottage door, and it never finds a comfortable answer.
A Maker Who Runs Away
Set against that voice is Victor, who brings a being to life and leaves the room the same night. Shelley never lets him off. He faints, sickens, raves with fever and lies in bed for months, and each collapse lets him avoid the plain duty in front of him. When the creature demands a companion as the price of peace, the argument he makes is coherent and fair, and at its heart sits one sentence: “I am malicious because I am miserable.” Victor has no real answer, only revulsion.
Victor’s half of the story has one warm presence in it. Henry Clerval, the boyhood friend who turns up just when Victor is falling apart, nurses him through months of fever and keeps the worst of it from the family at home. He is cheerful, curious and fond of poetry, and every page with him in it is a reminder of the ordinary affection Victor keeps choosing to forfeit.
The pair become each other’s mirror as the book goes on, hunter and hunted swapping places, each alone and each ruined by the other. A remote island laboratory, a cramped hut with a broken door on a rock in the northern sea, gives one of the most unsettling chapters, because it is the only time Victor stops to imagine the consequences of his own genius. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a horror novel, but its deepest fear is moral: that the people with the power to make things are the least willing to answer for them.
Where the Seams Show
The book was written by a teenager over roughly a year, and it shows in places. The creature masters a language and three classics with implausible speed, which the narrative waves through. Every narrator, explorer, scientist and creature alike, speaks in the same elevated cadence, so the voices blur when they ought to differ. The subplot of the Arabian woman and her father leans on the period’s lazy stereotypes of Turkish treachery. And the swooning is relentless; at some point the reader stops counting how often the hero loses consciousness. None of this sinks Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, but it does mean the novel rewards patience more than it rewards speed.
Readers should also go in knowing that the story contains murder, including the death of a child, as well as judicial cruelty, despair and a self-destructive grief that never lifts.
What Mary Shelley Was Carrying
Mary Shelley, who lived from 1797 to 1851, was eighteen when the story came to her. She spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, in the sodden season now called the Year Without a Summer, after Mount Tambora’s eruption dimmed the sun. Kept indoors at Byron’s rented Villa Diodati, the group agreed that each would write a ghost story. Byron’s fragment led to Polidori’s The Vampyre of 1819, the story that set the romantic vampire loose in fiction; Mary’s grew into this.
Grief runs underneath it. She had already lost her first child by the time she started, and more deaths followed. Percy drowned in 1822 when his boat went down in a storm off Viareggio, and she returned to England to raise their only surviving son and earn her living as a writer, with Perkin Warbeck and Lodore among the novels that followed. When she revised Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for a new edition in 1831, it was the work of a widow looking back at the girl who wrote it.
Hammer Films made Peter Cushing the face of the doctor from 1957, Guillermo del Toro cast Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi as maker and creature in 2025, and the BBC put it on its 2019 list of the hundred most influential novels.
Final Thoughts
For readers who want the original’s tenderness in newer clothes, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun gives the made being the narrator’s chair and asks what love is owed to it. Victoria Schwab’s Vicious keeps the two brilliant students and the experiment with death, then lets them become rivals. Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein puts Mary herself on the page beside a modern scientist of artificial minds.
But the source still matters most. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is uneven, overwrought and occasionally clumsy, and none of that dims the voice at its centre. Two centuries on, the creature is still outside the cottage, still listening, still waiting for someone to speak to him first.