Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
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Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Narrator: Alex Squire, The Light

Unabridged: 9 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/29/2026

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

Obsessed with uncovering the deepest secrets of life, a gifted young scientist isolates himself from family, love, and ordinary human feeling in pursuit of a single goal: to defeat death itself. After years of fevered study and dangerous experimentation, he succeeds in giving life to a being assembled from lifeless matter. The moment of triumph instantly becomes one of horror. Repulsed by what he has created, he flees from it, abandoning the newborn creature to face the world alone, without guidance, without love, and without identity.Cast out and driven away by every human it encounters, the creature wanders through forests, villages, and frozen wilderness, learning about humanity only by secretly observing it. It discovers language, kindness, suffering, and the ache of belonging by watching a poor family from eing being rather than hunted as a monster. When it finally reaches out for companionship, it is met with violence and rejection, crushing its last belief in mercy.From that moment, loneliness hardens into fury. The creature turns its pain outward and begins to strike back at the one who gave it life and then denied it love. A relentless chain of tragedy unfolds as innocence gives way to vengeance, and both creator and creation are pulled into a fatal pursuit across cities, mountains, and the frozen edge of the world.This dark and powerful story explores the terror of isolation, the consequences of unchecked ambition, and the moral responsibility that comes with creation. It asks whether a being is born monstrous or made so by cruelty, and whether the true horror lies in the creature itself—or in the human heart that refused to care for it.

About Mary Shelley

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the ardent feminist and author of A Vindication on the Right of Women, and William Goodwin, the radical-anarchist philosopher and author of Lives of the Necromancers, Mary Goodwin was born into a free-thinking, revolutionary household in London on August 30, 1797. Educated mainly by her intellectual surroundings, she had little formal schooling, and at age sixteen, she eloped with the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelly; they eventually married in 1816.

Mary Shelly's life had many tragic elements: her mother died giving birth to Mary; her half-sister committed suicide; Percy's wife Harriet Shelly drowned herself and her unborn child after he ran off with Mary; William Goodwin disowned Mary and Shelly after the elopement but, heavily in debt, recanted and came to them for money; Mary's first child died soon after its birth; and in 1822 Percy Shelly drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia—Mary was not quite twenty-five then.

Mary did not begin to write seriously until the summer of 1816, when she and Shelly were living in Switzerland, neighbors to Lord Byron. One night following a contest to compose ghost stories, Mary conceived her masterpiece, Frankenstein. After her husband's death, she continued to write, publishing Valperga, The Last Man, Ladore, and Faulkner between 1823 and 1837, in addition to editing Percy's works. In 1838 she began to work on his biography, but due to poor health she completed only a fragment.


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