Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she began writing this novel during a summer gathering with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The premise arose from a ghost story competition: a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, creates a living being from dead tissue and immediately abandons it in horror. The creature, intelligent and articulate, demands companionship from its creator and wreaks terrible vengeance when refused. Shelley framed the story as letters from an Arctic explorer who encounters Frankenstein pursuing his creation across the ice. The novel's full title, 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,' announces its mythic ambitions: this is a story about the dangers of overreaching, about creators' responsibilities to their creations, about what makes a being human. Shelley drew on contemporary debates about galvanism and the origins of life, but her concerns transcend any particular science. The creature's eloquent articulation of its suffering challenges readers to consider who the real monster is. Published in 1818, the novel helped inaugurate science fiction while remaining a powerful work of Romantic literature. Shelley went on to write other novels, but none matched Frankenstein's enduring influence on how we think about technology and responsibility.