Read Frankenstein by email.
Begun by an eighteen-year-old on a wet Swiss summer.
An Arctic explorer hauls a half-frozen stranger off the ice, and hears the story of his life: a young Genevese scientist, a forbidden experiment, and the being who followed him out of it. Conceived on a stormy night on Lake Geneva when Mary Shelley was eighteen, published in 1818, and often called the first science-fiction novel.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Four months from now, you will have read Mary Shelley.
131 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1818
- Installments
- 131
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 74,884
- Reading time
- 5 hours 12 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 9 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 4 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Frankenstein?
Frankenstein is nothing like its movie shadow. There is no lightning-bolt laboratory, no grunting monster — there is a brilliant, evasive narrator and a creature who reads Paradise Lost and argues his case with devastating eloquence. Readers consistently arrive expecting a horror story and leave having read a tragedy.
The novel is built of nested stories — an explorer's letters home, Victor's confession, the creature's own account — and it was made for serial delivery: the frame structure gives it natural cliffhangers a chapter-a-day schedule turns back on.
We serialize Mary Shelley's revised 1831 text in the Standard Ebooks edition, with a “Previously” recap on each installment that keeps the frame narratives straight — no small thing in a book where three narrators hand the story along.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Frankenstein?
About five and a half hours straight through (74,884 words). By email, it's 131 daily installments of 2–3 minutes — done in about four and a half months.
Is the book like the films?
Almost not at all. The creature speaks — beautifully. The horror is moral, not visual, and the saddest scenes are the ones no adaptation keeps.
Which version is this — 1818 or 1831?
The revised 1831 text, Mary Shelley's own final version, in the Standard Ebooks edition. We skip the 1831 introduction at the start — it discusses the ending — and begin, as she did, in the Arctic.
Is it a hard read?
The Romantic-era prose runs warmer and longer than modern fiction, but the story pulls hard, and installments end at natural breaks with recaps to reorient you each morning.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick. Free. Pause or unsubscribe anytime, from any installment.
Revised 1831 text, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.