The context of Frankenstein that really helped me best appreciate it all has to do with Mary Shelley. For one thing, the concept of a science fiction novel didn’t really exist yet and she was helping create the genre as she went along. She didn’t have any genre conventions yet to guide her writing. And she was 17. Just a teenager still. Her views on the world were not yet two decades formed. I was a moody philosophical teen too, though I didn’t produce anything so beautiful from it as she did.

It should be required reading.