An annotated and illustrated edition of Mary Shelley's classic work, celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2018.

First published in 1818, Frankenstein has spellbound, disturbed, and fascinated readers for generations. One of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, it has inspired numerous retellings and sequels in virtually every medium, making the Frankenstein myth familiar even to those who have never read a word of Mary Shelley’s remarkable novel. Now, this freshly annotated, illustrated edition illuminates the novel and its electrifying afterlife with unmatched detail and vitality.

From the first decade after publication, “Frankenstein” became a byword for any new, disturbing developments in science, technology, and human imagination. The editors’ Introduction explores the fable’s continuing presence in popular culture and intellectual life as well as the novel’s genesis and composition. Mary Shelley’s awareness of European politics and history, her interest in the poets and philosophical debates of the day, and especially her genius in distilling her personal traumas come alive in this engaging essay.

The editors’ commentary, placed conveniently alongside the text, provides stimulating company. Their often surprising observations are drawn from a lifetime of reading and teaching the novel. A wealth of illustrations, many in color, immerses the reader in Shelley’s literary and social world, in the range of artwork inspired by her novel, as well as in Frankenstein’s provocative cinematic career. The fresh light that The Annotated Frankenstein casts on a story everyone thinks is familiar will delight readers while deepening their understanding of Mary Shelley’s novel and the Romantic era in which it was created.

The star of Northanger Abbey is seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s youngest and most impressionable heroine. Away from home for the first time, on a visit to Bath with family friends, Catherine, a passionate consumer of novels (especially of the gothic variety), encounters a world in which everything beckons as a readable text: not only books, but also conversations and behaviors, clothes, carriages, estates, and vistas. In her lively introduction to this newest volume in Harvard’s celebrated annotated Austen series, Susan Wolfson proposes that Austen’s most underappreciated, most playful novel is about fiction itself and how it can take possession of everyday understandings.

The first of Austen’s major works to be completed (it was revised in 1803 and again in 1816–17), Northanger Abbey was published months after Austen’s death in July 1817, together with Persuasion. The 1818 text, whose singularly frustrating course to publication Wolfson recounts, is the basis for this freshly edited and annotated edition.

Wolfson’s running commentary will engage new readers while offering delights for scholars and devoted Janeites. A wealth of color images bring to life Bath society in Austen’s era—the parade of female fashions, the carriages running over open roads and through the city’s streets, circulating libraries, and nouveau-riche country estates—as well as the larger cultural milieu of Northanger Abbey. This unique edition holds appeal not just for “Friends of Jane” but for all readers looking for a fuller engagement with Austen’s extraordinary first novel.