...It was already one in the morning;  the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open;  it breathed hard, and convulsive motion agitated its limbs...
    …I started from my sleep with horror: a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became conclusive when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some articulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life…
    Thus was born the greatest monster in literature—the one built by Frankenstein. Pretty simple really—Mary Shelley was only an average writer but with one great idea. So much has been added, by films and analogy to her original concept that it doesn’t read at all well these days. Most of us perceive all matters frankensteinian in terms of the subsequent movies, especially the stunning effort by James Whale in 1931 in which Boris Karloff played the monster as a hideous, inarticulate creature with a bolt through its neck that could nevertheless win our hearts and minds and conjure our sympathy despite its awful crimes. It is one of the few novels to exert a direct influence on humanity—its theme continually present in our lives, its title a household word, and all the more so these days as medical science slowly transforms its fantasy into reality.
        Odder still, the author was a properly brought-up young woman—the demure wife of the dainty poet  Percy Shelley—and might have been the least probable person out of everyone who lived in her century to write a supreme masterpiece and create a powerful horror icon for our worst nightmares. The story goes that she fell under the evil influence of Bad Lord Byron, and that she was deeply scarred psychologically by a dreadful miscarriage. Grasping at straws, shrinkology would have her mind trying to mend her ruined foetus and indeed she claimed that she dreamed it all in a single night and just wrote down her memory of the dream.
        Maybe so. The truth is that the book is shabbily written and a pain to read. Long tedious sections keep the good bits well separated and the important sequences are usually over far too soon. The science is completely fudged, and no explanation of what went wrong (except for divine retribution) is offered. At first the monster is beautiful, except for the eyes, and it is only in the mind of the good doctor that it is ugly ..but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart... Sadly the monster decays, kills, rampages and then, after a time spying on the family in the forest, seeks out the doctor and demands a mate. Dr Frankenstein tries to make a female, but she dies and the monster seeks revenge on his own creator. The story is told chaotically—the narrator gives a verbatim account of a story told him by a sea captain who picked a man up off the Arctic ice (Frankenstein) who was dying but managed to tell him the main body of the story. In the midst of that, the monster tells the doctor of his adventures since his escape—a story within a story within a story within a story, all told in intimate detail. You completekly lose track of where you are—and then it  ends badly. But none of its many shortcomings have the slightest hope of preventing it from being one of the most inspired literary concepts and amongst the very greatest books ever written.

   I should add that all versions of the book up until the 1940s, along with James Whales' movie, render the creator's name  as Mrs Percy Shelley. And her mother was supposed to be an important early feminist. Ah, mothers and daughters, hey?