‘Everything must have a beginning ... and
that beginning must be linked to something that went before ... Invention, it
must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of
chaos.’
Mary Shelley, from
her Introduction to Frankenstein,
1831
‘My imagination, unbidden, possessed and
guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness
far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.’
Mary Shelley, from
her Introduction to Frankenstein,
1831
‘It is ironic but entirely appropriate that
... the nameless monster seems to have usurped the name of his creator.’
M.K. Joseph,
Introduction to Frankenstein, Oxford
World Classics Edition, 1998
‘Horace Walpole ... attempts to blend
imagination and probability. Other
writers of Gothic narratives do the same, placing the reader in that liminal
state between our real world and the world of imagined fears and horrors. They also, through their narrative methods,
provide an unsettling fragmentation of perspective, an unnerving sense of dark
truths hidden below, or embedded in, our everyday lives ...’
Bernard O’Keeffe,
‘Strange But True?’, The English Review,
February 2011
‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in
chains. One man thinks himself the
master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.’
Jean Jacques
Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
‘Mary Shelley is not an anti-Enlightenment
figure. Her novel is not an out-and-out
rejection of Godwin or Percy Shelley – to say that is to insult her as an
intellectual. It is better to think of Frankenstein as an analysis of the
dangers attendant on an exclusively intellectual approach to society.’
Dr Mike Rossington,
in an interview with Jerome Monahan, ‘A Critic’s Perspective on Frankenstein’, emagazine 2010
‘... the monster is, in a literal sense, a
projection of Frankenstein’s mind, and an embodiment of his guilt in
withdrawing from his kind and pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden,
is still dangerous.’
M.K.
Joseph, Introduction to Frankenstein,
Oxford World Classics Edition, 1998
