Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1 hr 32 min read

An ambitious young scientist discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter, and recoils in horror from the living creature he has made.

This is Volume 1 of a French edition of Mary Shelley's 1818 'Frankenstein,' the foundational novel of science fiction and one of the greatest of all Gothic tragedies. Profound, terrifying, endlessly resonant. Read it for the birth of the genre itself, a tale of creation, responsibility, and monstrous loneliness, in French.

In its time

Published in 1818, during the 1810s, frankenstein's decade.

Reading it

1 hr 32 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).