reported verbatim in a series of letters, and had opened her story, as she apparently intended, at the point where Frankenstein, after weary years of research, succeeds in creating a living being, her novel would have gained in force and intensity.  From that moment it holds us fascinated.  It is true that the tension relaxes from time to time, that the monster’s strange education and the Godwinian precepts that fall so incongruously from his lips tend to excite our mirth, but, though we are mildly amused, we are no longer merely bored.  Even the protracted descriptions of domestic life assume a new and deeper meaning, for the shadow of the monster broods over them.  One by one those whom Frankenstein loves fall victims to the malice of the being he has endowed with life.  Unceasingly and unrelentingly the loathsome creature dogs our imagination, more awful when he lurks unseen than when he stands actually before us.  With hideous malignity he slays Frankenstein’s young brother, and by a fiendish device causes Justine, an innocent girl, to be executed for the crime.  Yet ere long our sympathy, which has hitherto been entirely with Frankenstein, is unexpectedly diverted to the monster who, it would seem, is wicked only because he is eternally divorced from human society.  Amid the magnificent scenery of the Valley of Chamounix he appears before his creator, and tells the story of his wretched life, pleading:  “Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

He describes how his physical ugliness repels human beings, who fail to realise his benevolent intentions.  A father snatches from his arms the child he has rescued from death; the virtuous family, whom he admires and would fain serve, flee affrighted from his presence.  To educate the monster, so that his thoughts and emotions may become articulate, and, incidentally, to accentuate his isolation from society, Mrs. Shelley inserts a complicated story about an Arabian girl, Sofie, whose lover teaches her to read from Plutarch’s Lives, Volney’s Ruins of Empire, The Sorrows of Werther, and Paradise Lost.  The monster overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but, as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently because he knows Satan’s passionate outbursts of defiance and self-pity, who would cavil at the method by which he is made to acquire his knowledge?  “The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness.  All save I were at rest or in enjoyment.  I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me.”  And later, near the close of the book:  “The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.  Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone,” His fate reminds us of that of Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude, who: