Frankenstein

1. If a scientist creates something that can think and feel, what does the scientist owe it afterward? Does 'I made you' come with obligations?
2. Think about how people react to strangers who look unusual. How much of what we call someone's character is really our reaction to their appearance?
3. Ambition is usually praised. When does the drive to accomplish something extraordinary stop being admirable and start being dangerous?
4. This novel is told by narrators who are all defending themselves in some way. How should a reader decide how much to trust a story told by someone with something to prove?
5. Are people born good or cruel, or does the way the world treats them make them one or the other? What evidence would settle the question for you?
6. The subtitle calls Victor a 'modern Prometheus.' Before reading, what do you think a modern version of stealing fire from the gods would look like?

• Creation and responsibility: track every moment a character makes something or takes charge of someone, and notice who follows through and who walks away.
• Isolation: nearly every major figure is cut off from other people, sometimes by choice and sometimes by force, and the novel keeps asking what that isolation does to them.
• Appearance and prejudice: watch how quickly characters decide who someone is based on how that person looks, and what those snap judgments cost.
• Knowledge and its limits: notice when learning brings a character joy and when it brings misery, and whether the novel thinks some knowledge is better left alone.
• Nature as a mirror: pay attention to mountains, storms, ice, and seasons, which repeatedly reflect or answer what a character is feeling.
• Nested narration: keep track of who is speaking at any given moment and who they are speaking to, because the same events look different depending on the voice telling them.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, the daughter of two famous radical writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued for women's education and rights, and William Godwin, a political philosopher. Her mother died days after she was born, and Mary grew up in a house full of books, arguments, and visiting intellectuals. She began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, at eighteen years old, while staying near Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she later married, and Lord Byron; the group challenged one another to write ghost stories during a stretch of cold, storm-bound weather. Her contribution was published anonymously in 1818, when she was twenty. She went on to write several other novels, including the early post-apocalyptic story The Last Man, and to edit and publish her husband's poetry after his death, but Frankenstein remains the work that made her one of the most influential writers in English.

Frankenstein belongs to the Romantic period, when writers and artists reacted against pure reason by insisting on emotion, imagination, and the overwhelming power of wild nature — which is why so much of this novel happens on glaciers, in storms, and among Alpine peaks. It also arrives at a moment of genuine scientific excitement and unease: experimenters such as Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini had shown that electricity could make the muscles of dead animals twitch, and public demonstrations of this 'galvanism' had audiences seriously debating whether life itself might be an electrical force. The summer Shelley conceived the book was itself strange — 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer after a volcanic eruption in Indonesia darkened skies across Europe and drove her circle indoors. Shelley's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, reaches back to the Greek myth of the Titan who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity and was punished forever for it, framing Victor's ambition as the newest version of a very old story.