Princeton professor Susan Wolfson on why we love 'Frankenstein' two centuries later

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, permeated our cultural imagination in a way few stories have. With a new film adaptation directed by Guillermo del Toro out now, we’re revisiting a 2012 conversation about the Gothic classic. In today’s episode, NPR’s Rachel Martin speaks with Princeton English professor Susan Wolfson, who co-edited an annotated version of the book. They discuss Frankenstein’s representation in pop culture, film, and television – and Wolfson’s favorite depiction of the monster.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's that new Frankenstein movie
0:07.0	directed by Guillermo del Toro about to come out on Netflix. It's got a pretty stacked cast.
0:12.4	Oscar Isaac, Mia Gauth, Jacob Allorty is playing The Monster. And it's worth wondering,
0:18.3	what is it about this story that draws people to it even today?
0:23.4	Well, back in 2012, English professor Susan Wolfson edited an annotated version of Mary Shelley's
0:28.6	original book, and she spoke with NPR's Rachel Martin about that exact question.
0:34.0	Their conversation after the break.
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1:02.7	cross-track wilderness. Love of Adventure elevated. There are some books that have saturated
1:09.1	themselves so deeply into our culture and consciousness.
1:12.5	We tend to believe we've read them, even when we haven't.
1:15.4	Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of those books.
1:18.4	It's alive. It's alive. It's alive.
1:22.0	The Gothic horror tale, written in 1818, is the story of Victor Frankenstein.
1:27.0	He's an ambitious scientist in a quest
1:29.2	to create life. In that quest, he inadvertently creates a monster, the creature.
1:38.8	Frankenstein, in its multiple incarnations in film and TV, is all about the stuff that makes for a good tale on Halloween,
	...

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