New Annotated Frankenstein

I read "Frankenstein" back when I was a teenager, and again as an undergrad when I took a class on horror literature (Best.Class.Ever.). I hadn't read it since, so while I knew the story (it's one of those books that even if you haven't read it, you probably know the basic story) I couldn't remember all of the exact details. I actually ended up remembering more than I thought I did. I really enjoy annotated books, they add so much fun background information if they're done correctly, and this one was nicely done. It's still amazing to me that Mary Shelley (Mary Goodwin at the time, she hadn't married Percy Shelley yet, although they had already had two children together at this point) was only 19 when she wrote the rough draft for "Frankenstein". The story of how it came about is pretty familiar: while trapped in a villa during a particularly rainy summer, the occupants challenged each other to tell scary ghost stories, and "Frankenstein" was the story Mary came up with. Of course it was a little more complicated than that, and she worked on it for awhile before it was published. Scholars have debated for years over how much help Percy gave her, and it turns out some, but the story was definitely hers. What was nice about this version was that it was the original one from 1818, she revised it quite a bit in 1831 and that's the version most people have read (including me). Klinger did a good job of pointing out that while most of the differences were stylistic, some definitely had to do with what had happened to Mary in the years between the two versions: her young son William had died, she'd given birth to another child, and Percy had drowned. In 1831 she was more sympathetic to her characters than in 1818, realizing that sometimes life just hands you bad luck and it has nothing to do with the choices you've made and the life you've led. It makes perfect sense: at 19 I thought I knew everything, too, and was very hard on people, assuming their poor life decisions led to their circumstances. Now I know better, and it seems like Mary did too.