She was eighteen. The summer of 1816 had no weather in it, a volcano on the other side of the world having put the sun out, and a house party above Lake Geneva was stuck indoors reading German ghost stories to each other. Byron proposed they each write one. Byron gave his up after a few pages and Shelley abandoned his. She spent the next year turning hers into a novel and published it anonymously, in three volumes, before she was twenty-one. Reviewers assumed a man had written it.
It reaches you at three removes. An English captain, iced in near the pole and writing home to a sister who never answers, takes aboard a man his crew finds on a floe. What the captain copies into his letters is that man's confession, and partway through it the confession stops and the thing he made is allowed to speak for itself, in the middle of the book, in its own voice, at length.
That is the part the films have never had the nerve to keep. It has no name and it is not stupid. It learns French standing at the wall of a cottage where a family of exiles is teaching the language to a guest. It reads Paradise Lost and takes it for history, which changes what it thinks it is. It finds a journal in the pocket of the coat it was wearing when it woke, and reads in its maker's own hand the account of the four months that produced it and of the moment he looked at the finished work and left the room. Then it comes down off the glacier and asks him for one thing, and is refused, and the rest of the book is what that refusal costs a family in Geneva.
Nobody in it is a monster and nobody in it is innocent. A young man does a piece of work no one has done, then declines every consequence of having done it, and the novel is patient enough to let him narrate his own case for two hundred pages while the reader keeps count of what he leaves out. It has been in print for two centuries because that argument has not aged: the maker who will not stay for the thing he made is a figure we now meet in the news.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of the author's revised text of 1831, the third edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 218 pages. Walton's four letters, all twenty-four chapters under the roman numerals the novel has been cited by since Bentley set it, the closing letter-journal, and both of the author's own front matter pieces for this edition: her introduction of 1831, which is where the wet summer and the ghost story wager are recorded in her own words, and the preface of 1817. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the modern introductions that hand you the ending before you have read a line.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
