A review of the two best editions! (Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Member Name: LadyAudley

Product:	Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Date:	05/01/08 (31 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Get the authentic, romantic text

Disadvantages: Be careful which version you buy!

To preface this review: this isn't so much a review of the book, but rather a recommendation of which edition to buy, since there are literally tens of them on the market!

It's a bit odd that Dooyoo only offer only one version of a novel to review, because there's a big difference between different editions of a text (though many people who haven't studied English at college don't realize this!). Next time you're looking at a literary classic published by Penguin or OUP, have a flick through to front of the volume, and you are likely to find a 'Note on the Text'. This will tell you where the editor has got the text from, and should outline the principles on which the text has been produced. Read several of these, and it'll soon become clear that there are a lot of different schools of thought about what constitutes an "authoritative" text! One edition of a novel can be really very different to another.

The thing with Frankenstein is that Mary Shelley revised the text fairly extensively. The novel was first published in 1818, and this is generally the book studied by students of the Romantic period (literature from about 1780 to 1830). However, Shelley went through and made some fairly substantial alterations in 1831. A lot of cheaper editions of this book won't tell you which text you're reading. Does that make a difference? Well yes it does, especially if you're interested in cultural history. If you want to know the version that was read by Percy Shelley, Byron, Austen (etc.), then you need 1818. If you want to know what exactly Mary decided to change in response to the more Victorian mindset of 1831, then you might need to compare both!

So what would I recommend? Well, Oxford University Press publish the 1818 edition, very well edited by Marilyn Butler. It's cheap at around £4 from Amazon, and it's a proper scholarly job with a good introduction and notes for first time readers.

There's also a terrific, but more expensive edition published by Broadview Press and edited by D.L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf, which retails for around £12 (the price varies because it's an American publisher). This also uses 1818 as the copytext (the "basis" for the edition), and contains a very illuminating introduction and comprehensive notes. For A-level and degree students, this extra material will make a real difference to essays.

Personally, if you're studying this novel, I would advise you to avoid any version that doesn't state which text you're reading and isn't edited by someone who is an expert. (Celebrities and novelists are really entertaining, but there's some difficult historical context to grapple with if you really want to understand this book, so helpful notes are very handy).

Summary: Perhaps Dooyoo need to consider offering us different editions to review!