Frankenstein (1818)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, LibriVox volunteers · 1818 · 446 min

Written on a dare at Lake Geneva in the rainy summer of 1816, when Byron proposed ghost stories and eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley produced the founding document of science fiction. Everything the genre would later do is already here: the scientist who will not consider consequences, the creation who becomes his conscience, the frame narrative that asks who is actually telling you this and what it costs them.

It is also a much stranger, sadder book than its screen reputation — Victor is no cackling baron but a hollowing-out of a young man in real time, and the creature teaches himself to speak by reading Plutarch and Paradise Lost. Seven and a half hours; the 1818 text, before Shelley's later revisions softened it.

Chosen reading: LibriVox production, Internet Archive item frankenstein_1107_librivox — 25 files contiguously numbered (frankenstein_00_shelley_64kb.mp3 … frankenstein_24_shelley_64kb.mp3, the 00 file being the project's front matter), 214 MB, 7 h 26 min total, catalogued 2011-07-10.

Checked against the item's file table before staging: numbering contiguous, no gaps, no duplicates. The 64 kbps MP3 set ships.

Listened through (2026-08-25): the solo reading carries all twenty-four chapters cleanly.

Two layers, both clear:

• The book. Published anonymously in 1818; the 1818 first-edition text is public domain by term expiry many times over. This reading uses that text.
• The narration. LibriVox dedicates its recordings to the public domain; the item carries a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 label. Recorded 2011 by volunteers credited in the project's own materials.