All 28 entries — Walton's four letters and Victor's twenty-four chapters.
The novel has a frame story. Robert Walton, an English explorer, writes letters home from his expedition to the North Pole. Halfway through, he picks up a stranger from the ice — Victor Frankenstein, dying. Victor tells him the entire story of his life in twenty-four chapters. Inside that, in Chapters 11-16, the Creature himself takes over the narration and tells Victor the story of his own short life. After Victor's death, the frame closes back around in three final letters. Three voices, in three rings.
An English explorer, the Russian ice, a stranger on a sled.
December in St. Petersburg. Robert Walton writes to his sister Margaret in London about his ambition: a polar expedition to find the passage through the ice to the warm sea he believes lies beyond. Mary Shelley's opening voice is not Victor's — it is the man we will eventually trust to tell us about him.
Three months later, Archangel. Walton has the ship and the men but no equal — he writes that he wishes for a friend on board, "a sympathy of human feeling." The line will be remembered later, when Victor arrives on the ice.
A short third letter. The ice has broken, the expedition is at sea, the wind is fair. Walton signs off cheerfully. The next letter is the one that changes everything.
The ship is locked in the ice in August. A first figure of gigantic stature is sighted on a sled, driving north. Two days later, a second man drifts past, dying. They bring him aboard. He recovers. He hears about Walton's ambition and decides to tell him a story.
Geneva, Ingolstadt, the creation, William's death.
Victor's narration begins. A happy childhood in Geneva. His parents adopt a girl from a Lake Como cottage — Elizabeth Lavenza — as his future wife. A younger brother is born; another follows. Henry Clerval is his close friend. The family is, by Victor's account, ideal.
At thirteen, Victor finds a volume of Cornelius Agrippa and falls in love with the alchemists' search for the elixir of life. His father dismisses them as trash; Victor reads on. By the time he is seventeen and ready for university, he is fixed on the question of how life can be made.
Victor arrives at Ingolstadt grieving. Krempe, the first professor, dismisses his alchemists as foolish. Waldman, the second, takes them seriously enough to praise their ambition while explaining their failures. Victor is captured. He finds his teacher — and his obsession.
Two years of solitary obsessive work. Victor robs charnel houses for materials, stops writing home, and stops eating. He is on the verge — he believes — of producing the principle of animation. The chapter is the novel's only long look at the obsession; the creation comes next.
Victor brings the Creature to life and is so revolted by the result that he runs out of the laboratory. He sleeps, dreams, returns at dawn — the Creature is gone. He wanders the city; Henry Clerval finds him there. Victor collapses into months of brain fever; Henry nurses him.
Victor recovers slowly under Henry's care. A letter arrives from Elizabeth — the first sustained voice from home in two years. She writes about Justine Moritz, about William, about her hope that Victor will come back to them soon. He weeps over the letter. He does not write back.
A letter from Alphonse: William has been murdered. Justine is suspected. Victor races home. On the mountain that night, in a flash of lightning, he sees the Creature climbing the slope and understands. He knows Justine is innocent. He says nothing.
Justine is tried for William's murder on circumstantial evidence — the locket. Victor knows she is innocent. He says nothing. Elizabeth speaks at the trial; her defense fails. Justine, pressured by her confessor, falsely confesses. She is hanged the next morning.
Mountain meeting; the Creature's own story.
Victor walks the Alps for weeks trying to silence his guilt. The mountains do not silence it. On Montanvert one morning he sees a figure crossing the ice toward him at extraordinary speed. The Creature has been waiting for this conversation.
The Creature speaks for the first time. Articulate, lucid, calm. He has come to be heard. "I ought to be thy Adam," he says, "but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." He asks Victor to hear his story. Victor agrees. They go to a hut on the slope.
The Creature begins his narration. He remembers waking — the sensations, the fleeing into the forest, learning to drink from streams, learning that fire burned. He saw his own reflection in a pool and was terrified by it. He is, at this stage, an innocent.
The Creature finds a hovel attached to a peasant cottage and watches the family inside through a chink in the wall. The blind old De Lacey, his son Felix, his daughter Agatha. They are poor and they love each other. The Creature, watching, learns what a family is — and begins, secretly, to help them.
Safie, an Arabian woman, arrives at the cottage on horseback. She has crossed Europe alone to find Felix, who once rescued her father from a French prison. Felix begins teaching her French. The Creature, eavesdropping, learns at the same pace. He learns to read.
The Creature recounts the De Laceys' full history — how Felix, witnessing an Arabian merchant condemned by a French court on a fabricated charge, engineered the man's escape; how the discovery cost the De Lacey family everything; how Safie, after her father's death, traveled across Europe alone to find Felix.
The Creature's plan: reveal himself to the blind father first, when the others are away. He does. The conversation is going well — the blind man cannot see him and is moved by his voice. Then Felix and Agatha return. They see him. Felix beats him from the cottage. The Creature flees.
The Creature crosses Europe to Geneva. He saves a girl from drowning and is shot for his trouble. He encounters William in the woods. The boy screams, calls him a monster, mentions Victor's name. The Creature strangles him. He finds the locket. He plants it on the sleeping Justine.
The promised mate destroyed; pursuit; the ice.
The Creature finishes his narration on the ice and makes his demand: a mate. Make her, he says, and we will leave forever. Refuse, and the violence will not stop. Victor argues; eventually agrees. He starts down the mountain committed.
Victor announces he must visit England before marrying Elizabeth. Henry accompanies him through Germany, the Low Countries, England, Scotland. Henry is happy. Victor is dreading the work waiting for him. In Edinburgh he leaves Henry behind and travels alone to a hut on a remote island in the Orkneys.
Victor sets up his second laboratory in the hut on the Orkney island and begins the work. He hates every minute of it. One afternoon he looks up and sees the Creature watching him through the window, smiling. The smile decides him. He cannot finish.
Victor tears the half-finished female apart in front of the Creature. The Creature howls. He swears revenge in the novel's most-quoted threat: "I will be with you on your wedding-night." Victor disposes of the remains at sea. On his return to shore he is arrested for a murder he did not commit.
Victor recovers in an Irish jail. The body is Henry's — the marks at the throat are the Creature's. Months of brain fever; a trial; an acquittal. Alphonse arrives and brings him home. Victor cannot say what he knows.
Father and son return to Geneva. Elizabeth, who has guessed something is wrong, offers Victor an out. He refuses. They marry. On the wedding evening Victor, expecting the Creature to come for him, arms himself and posts guard. He sends Elizabeth to a separate room. He has misunderstood the threat.
Victor brings the news to Alphonse. The old man dies of grief within days. Victor finally tells a magistrate the entire story; the magistrate is sympathetic but doesn't believe him. Victor sets out alone to hunt the Creature. The pursuit takes him across Russia and into the polar ice.
Walton picks up Victor on the ice — the frame closes. Victor dies. The Creature appears in the cabin, weeping over the body. He gives his last speech — he will go north and burn himself on his own funeral pyre. He climbs out the porthole and is gone. Walton turns the ship for home.