Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
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Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Narrator: AI Voice Alex Mercer

Unabridged: 7 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/28/2026


Synopsis

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein on a rainy night in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816, when a group of friends challenged one another to write a ghost story. She was eighteen years old. What she produced over the following months was not a ghost story at all, but something stranger and more durable: the account of a young scientist who succeeds in creating life, and then abandons the creature he has made.

Victor Frankenstein, raised in comfort in Geneva and consumed by the new science of his age, assembles a living being from the dead and is horrified by what opens its eyes. He flees. The creature, nameless and alone, teaches himself language and thought by watching a family through a gap in a wall, and learns that the world has no place for him. What follows is a slow, patient demand for recognition, and a revenge that destroys everyone it touches.

The novel moves from the Alps to the Orkney Islands to the frozen Arctic, told in letters and confessions nested inside one another. Shelley wrote it as a young woman surrounded by poets, and it carries the questions of that circle: whether knowledge without judgment is a gift or a curse, what a person owes to the thing he has made, and whether loneliness can be a kind of education. Two centuries on, the creature has become a Halloween costume and a shorthand for scientific hubris - but the book itself is quieter, sadder and far stranger than its reputation suggests.

This unabridged recording presents the complete 1818-era text as published in the standard edition, including the four opening letters from the Arctic explorer Robert Walton, whose voyage frames the story. Narrated in a single voice by Alex Mercer.

About Mary Shelley

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the ardent feminist and author of A Vindication on the Right of Women, and William Goodwin, the radical-anarchist philosopher and author of Lives of the Necromancers, Mary Goodwin was born into a free-thinking, revolutionary household in London on August 30, 1797. Educated mainly by her intellectual surroundings, she had little formal schooling, and at age sixteen, she eloped with the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelly; they eventually married in 1816.

Mary Shelly's life had many tragic elements: her mother died giving birth to Mary; her half-sister committed suicide; Percy's wife Harriet Shelly drowned herself and her unborn child after he ran off with Mary; William Goodwin disowned Mary and Shelly after the elopement but, heavily in debt, recanted and came to them for money; Mary's first child died soon after its birth; and in 1822 Percy Shelly drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia—Mary was not quite twenty-five then.

Mary did not begin to write seriously until the summer of 1816, when she and Shelly were living in Switzerland, neighbors to Lord Byron. One night following a contest to compose ghost stories, Mary conceived her masterpiece, Frankenstein. After her husband's death, she continued to write, publishing Valperga, The Last Man, Ladore, and Faulkner between 1823 and 1837, in addition to editing Percy's works. In 1838 she began to work on his biography, but due to poor health she completed only a fragment.


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