Victor Frankenstein learns the secret of producing life, and so, by putting together parts of various corpses, he creates the Frankenstein monster. The monster is huge and disformed, but he means no harm to anyone--until constant ill treatment drives him to murder and revenge. This easy-to-read vers[...]

Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Shelley's "Frankenstein." The story of Victor Frankenstein's monstrous creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and s[...]

In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In the most in-depth study to date of Wollstonecraft?s thought, Barbara Taylor de[...]

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonel[...]

No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright plagiarisms which hav[...]

Throughout her works, Mary Wollstonecraft interrogates and represents the connected network of theater, culture, and self-representation, in what Lisa Plummer Crafton argues is a conscious appropriation of theater in its literal, cultural, and figurative dimensions. Situating Wollstonecraft within e[...]

A brilliant, early dystopian tale of classic science fiction. The Last Man is a powerful, post-apocalyptic tale and precurser to the much later science fiction novels of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison amongst others. Overshadowed by the titanic success of Frankenstein,[...]

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. It was written in reaction to Rousseau's Emile (1762), which argued that the purpose of a girl's education was to make her useful to a man. Wollstonecraft offered a defence of woman's ability to reason, given app[...]