Victor Frankenstein assembles a living creature in a candlelit attic, sees what he has made, and runs. Everything that follows — the pursuit across the ice, the demand for a companion, the murders — comes from that flight rather than from the act of creation. Shelley began it at eighteen, in a wet summer on Lake Geneva, and the creature's own account of his abandonment remains the part readers cannot argue their way out of. The Gilded Library sets the 1831 text among period paintings of Alpine ice, laboratory gloom and solitary wandering; the ornament is built from lightning, glass retorts and thorn.