The Norton Critical Edition, third edition
The 1818 text with maps, sources, the reviews and eleven critical essays.
Frankenstein has been read as a book about science, birth, slavery, revolution and grief. Read it with that argument bound in.
You want the novel and the long argument about it in one book, and you will read the essays at the back.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the 1818 first edition, introduced and annotated by J. Paul Hunter.
Changes: nothing in the novel. Around it: maps and illustrations, sources and influences, material on how it was written and revised, its reception and adaptations, and eleven critical essays, six of them new to this edition.
Whose story is it?
the novel’s, and then the critics’.
How much time does it ask?
584 pages in paperback.
W. W. Norton, third edition, 12 March 2021 (UK date), 584 pages, edited by J. Paul Hunter.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More Frankensteins: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Penguin Classics) · Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics) · Frankenstein: the 1831 text (Penguin Classics, ed. Maurice Hindle)