The Monster in the Mirror: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Still Haunts Us

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It begins in the cold, with a letter written amid the ice. And it ends, still cold, with a figure drifting into the darkness, consumed by grief and fury. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, first published anonymously in 1818 and revised under her name in 1823, is a novel born of a fevered imagination—and a remarkably modern anxiety. A work of gothic fiction, Romantic philosophy, and proto-science fiction, Frankenstein is also, at its core, a parable about the dangers of unchecked ambition and the human cost of intellectual pride. It has been misread for centuries—often reduced to a…