To many readers, who have perhaps known Frankenstein only at second hand, the original may well come as a surprise. Whe Mary Shelley began it, she was only 18, though she was already Shelley´s mistress and Byron´s friend. In her preface she explains how she n Shelley spent part of a wet summer with Byron in Swizerland, amusing themselves by reading and writing and writing ghost stories. Her contribution was Frankenstein, a story about a student of natural philosophy who learns the secret of imparting life to creature constructed from bones hehas collected in charnel-houses. The story is not a study of the macabre, as such, but rather a study of how man uses his power, through science, to manipulate and pervert his own destiny, and this makes it profundly disturbing book.3,50 €
