An oil painting of a woman reading a book.

Reading and literary discussion can forge a path to overcoming loneliness. (Painting: Thomas Anshutz.)

The Pleasure of Finding Community in a Book

USC Dornsife’s college dean of undergraduate education considers the connective power of reading.

ByEmily Hodgson Anderson June 10, 2024

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is one of the loneliest books I know. Maybe this is why I kept reading and re-reading it as a lonely child. The creature’s isolation, and quest for companionship, drive the novel, and as a child reader I empathized with both. “I am alone and miserable,” states the creature to his creator, since in his loneliness he has finally tracked down Victor to demand a mate.

This same desire for companionship seems true for many of Shelley’s other characters, too. “I have no friend, Margaret,” announces the sailor-narrator Walton in the novel’s opening pages. “We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up,” agrees Victor, listening to Walton’s lament. “To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate,” says the blind DeLacey to the creature, speaking from his own experience of exile, though he knows not to whom he speaks.