Bibliography: p. [xxi]-xxii.

"To many readers, who have perhaps known Frankenstein only at second hand, the original may well come as a surprise. When Mary Shelley began it, she was eighteen, and it has some of the gaucheries of a novice writer. But she was also, at the time, Shelley's mistress and Byron's friend, and was a fascinated participant in those first fruitful encounters between the two poets at Geneva in the summer of 1816, from which she absorbed ideas on the nature of life and human consciousness. The result was an entirely original novel, with a character of its own. Although it is not a study of the macabre in any obvious sense, it presents its own dark vision of a man's power, through science, to manipulate and pervert his own destiny, and this makes it a profoundly disturbing book.
The present text has been edited by Professor M. K. Joseph of the University of Auckland from Mary Shelley's revision of 1831, and includes material designed to show how the book was shaped both by the myth of Prometheus and by the Alpine scenery among which much of it was composed." -- Inside cover