Mary Shelley wrote it in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. She was eighteen. Byron was there. Percy Shelley was there. The summer was unusually cold (a volcanic eruption in Indonesia the previous year had thrown enough ash into the atmosphere to dim the sun across Europe). Trapped indoors by the rain, Byron proposed each of them write a ghost story. Shelley's was the only one that survived.
An English explorer named Robert Walton, on a ship trapped in Arctic ice, rescues a half-frozen man across the pack ice. The man's name is Victor Frankenstein. He has a story to tell. Two years of obsession in a Bavarian university. A creature assembled from cadavers and brought to life in a single November night. The creature's eight months alone in a forest, watching a French family through a chink in their cottage wall, learning to speak by listening to them. The creature's reasonable demand: make me a wife. Victor's last-minute refusal. Everything Victor loves murdered, one by one, in retaliation.
Shelley wrote in clear post-Romantic English, with the epistolary frame (Walton's letters home) bookending Victor's first-person account inside Walton's. The B2 adaptation preserves the structure across fifteen short chapters: the lake, the laboratory, the awakening, the Mer de Glace, the cottage of the De Laceys, the wedding night, the chase across the ice.
Shelley's English is post-Romantic — long sentences, occasional Latinate vocabulary, but always logically constructed. B2 is the level where the syntactic complexity of the original starts to feel rewarding rather than punishing. The creature's eloquence (he learns French by reading Plutarch, Goethe's Werther, and Milton's Paradise Lost — all aloud, hidden in a shed) is the high-water mark of Romantic-era prose.
Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Frankenstein was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B2. Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Frankenstein is rated B2, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.