Timeline

• Sep 13, 2025: started reading.
• Sep 29, 2025: finished reading.

Review

To my eternal embarrassment I had only ever read excerpts from or essays about this book. Never the original novel in its entirety. Now I can more confidently say that you should be required to read this before you’re allowed to pitch your start up idea.

Jokes aside, it’s hard to read this novel without any prior conceptions. This story in all its mutations and evolutions takes up so much space in the modern cultural imagination that you’d be forgiven for thinking you know it backward and forward already. But Shelley’s original is really a masterclass in so many things: the gothic style, the epistolary, layered and conflicting narrative perspectives, and of course the parable of how misguided our obsession with scientific progress can be if divorced from a moral foundation.

Aside from seething with jealousy that Shelley managed to write something so good when she was only 18, I enjoyed reading it through two lenses I had come across recently. First, of course, the contemporary frenzy about generative “A.I.”. Second, as the Danish author Olga Ravn has pointed out, it can understood as a rich metaphor for motherhood. Both of these lenses were rewarding and fruitful.