Frankenstein

Summary

What would you do if you could create life itself?

A young man, brilliant and obsessed, stands alone in a laboratory on a dreary November night. The rain patters against the window. A candle gutters. And then—a yellow eye opens. A convulsive breath. The thing on the table moves.

Victor Frankenstein has done the impossible. He has created life from death. And in that moment of triumph, he feels nothing but horror.

This is Frankenstein.

The Birth of a Monster

Mary Shelley wrote this novel in 1818, when she was just twenty years old. The story famously began as part of a ghost story competition at Lake Geneva, where Shelley was staying with her future husband Percy and their friend Lord Byron. But what emerged was something far more than a ghost story—it was a meditation on creation, responsibility, and the terrible consequences of abandoning what we bring into the world.

The novel opens not with Victor Frankenstein, but with an explorer named Robert Walton, sailing toward the North Pole in search of glory. Trapped in ice, his ship encounters a strange sight: a gigantic figure driving a dog sled across the frozen wasteland, and then, shortly after, a wasted, dying man pursuing him. That man is Victor Frankenstein, and he has a story to tell.

Victor comes from a loving family in Geneva. He has a devoted father, a beautiful adopted sister named Elizabeth whom he is expected to marry, and a best friend, Henry Clerval, full of warmth and imagination. His childhood is idyllic. But Victor harbors a dangerous curiosity. As a young man, he becomes obsessed with the old alchemists—Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus—who promised to unlock the secrets of immortality. When lightning destroys a tree before his eyes, he glimpses the true power of nature and becomes consumed with a new ambition: to discover the principle of life itself.

The Creation

At the University of Ingolstadt, Victor throws himself into his studies with a fervor that borders on madness. He haunts graveyards and charnel houses, collecting body parts. He works in a solitary chamber at the top of his lodgings, assembling a creature from the dead. He tells no one what he is doing. He writes no letters home. He neglects his health, his friends, everything—all for the dream of playing God.

And then, on that November night, he succeeds.

But Victor has made a terrible miscalculation. He imagined his creation would be beautiful. He selected the finest features, the most luxuriant hair. Instead, the creature that opens its yellow eyes is hideous beyond imagining. Its skin barely covers its muscles and arteries. Its face is a mask of horror.

Victor flees his own creation. He collapses into a nervous fever that lasts months. And the creature? The creature simply disappears.

Here is the first of Victor’s many failures: he abandons his creation at the moment of its birth. He takes no responsibility for what he has made. He wants only to forget that it exists.

The Innocent Die

Victor returns to health, tries to resume his normal life, and then receives devastating news: his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Victor rushes home to Geneva. On the way, during a violent thunderstorm, he glimpses a massive figure on the mountainside—and knows instantly that his creation has returned.

But when Victor arrives home, he learns that someone has already been accused of the murder: Justine Moritz, a young woman who has lived with the Frankenstein family since childhood. A miniature portrait of Victor’s mother, which William had been wearing, was found in her pocket.

Victor knows Justine is innocent. He knows the creature killed William. But he says nothing. How could he explain? Who would believe him? And so Justine is tried, convicted, and executed for a murder she did not commit.

This is Victor’s second great sin: he lets an innocent woman die rather than admit what he has done.

The Creature Speaks

Consumed by guilt and grief, Victor wanders into the Alps, seeking solace in the mountains. And there, on the glacier of Montanvert, the creature finds him.

What follows is one of the most remarkable sections of the novel. The creature speaks—eloquently, philosophically, heartbreakingly. He tells Victor the story of his own existence.

He did not choose to be hideous. He did not choose to be abandoned. When he came into the world, he was as innocent as a newborn child. He wandered through forests, learning to survive. He found shelter in a hovel attached to a cottage and spent months secretly observing the family within—a blind old man, his son and daughter, and eventually a beautiful young woman named Safie.

The creature taught himself to speak by listening to them. He learned to read by watching them teach Safie French. He found books—Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther—and through them, he learned what it meant to be human. He learned about love, about goodness, about belonging.

And he wanted, more than anything, to be accepted.

Rejected

The creature’s plan was simple: he would reveal himself first to the blind old man, De Lacey, who could not see his hideous form and might accept him for his gentle words and kind intentions. And it almost worked. The old man listened to him with sympathy. The creature wept with hope.

Then the others returned. They saw him. They drove him out with violence and horror.

“I am malicious because I am miserable,” the creature tells Victor. He did not begin as a monster. He was made into one—by abandonment, by rejection, by the cruelty of a world that judged him only by his appearance.

He makes Victor a proposition: create for him a companion, a female creature as hideous as himself, and he will disappear forever into the wilderness of South America. Give him someone to love, someone who will not recoil from him in disgust, and he will trouble humanity no more.

Victor agrees.

The Promise Broken

Victor travels to a remote part of Scotland and begins his terrible work again. But as the female creature takes shape before him, doubt creeps in. What if she is even more malevolent than the first? What if they breed, creating a race of monsters? What if she rejects her intended mate, driving him to even greater fury?

In the midst of his work, Victor looks up and sees the creature watching through the window, waiting. And in that moment, Victor tears his creation apart.

The creature’s response is chilling: “I will be with you on your wedding night.”

The Wedding Night

Victor’s best friend Henry Clerval is murdered—strangled by the creature while Victor lies unconscious in a nearby town. Victor is briefly imprisoned for the crime before being released for lack of evidence. He returns home broken.

But Elizabeth is waiting. Sweet, patient Elizabeth, who has loved Victor all her life despite his strangeness, his silences, his long absences. They marry.

On their wedding night, Victor paces the halls with a pistol, expecting the creature to come for him. But the creature’s revenge is far more cruel. Victor hears a scream from the bedroom. He finds Elizabeth dead, her body thrown across the bed.

Victor’s father, unable to bear this final loss, dies of grief shortly after.

Victor has lost everything. His creation has taken everyone he loved.

The Chase

What remains is pursuit. Victor chases the creature north, across Russia, into the Arctic wastes. The creature leaves taunting messages, food caches to keep Victor alive. He wants to be chased. He wants Victor to suffer.

This is where Walton’s ship finds Victor—dying on the ice, still pursuing the monster. Victor tells Walton his story as a warning. Do not seek forbidden knowledge. Do not let ambition destroy everything you love.

Victor dies aboard the ship. And then, in the novel’s final scene, the creature appears. He mourns over Victor’s body—the only being who could have loved him, the father who abandoned him. He tells Walton that he will travel to the farthest reaches of the North, build his own funeral pyre, and end his miserable existence.

He vanishes into the darkness and the ice.

What It Means

Frankenstein is often misremembered. People think the monster is called Frankenstein. They imagine bolts in his neck, a flat head, a shambling gait. But Shelley’s creature is eloquent, sensitive, capable of love and philosophy. He is not born evil. He is made evil by neglect.

The novel asks: who is the real monster? The creature who kills out of despair and rage? Or the creator who abandons his creation at the moment of its birth and then refuses to take responsibility for the consequences?

Victor Frankenstein is brilliant, ambitious, and utterly self-absorbed. He wants the glory of creation without the burden of care. He plays God and then flees from the results. He lets innocent people die rather than confess his sins. He is warned, again and again, that his secrecy will destroy him, and he persists anyway.

The creature, by contrast, asks only to be loved. He is willing to disappear forever if someone will simply acknowledge his humanity.

Mary Shelley subtitled her novel “The Modern Prometheus.” Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. For this, he was punished eternally. Victor Frankenstein steals the secret of life itself—and his punishment is to watch everyone he loves die.

But Shelley’s deepest insight is this: the tragedy is not that Victor created life. The tragedy is that he refused to love what he created.