Frankenstein, read as five moments
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Frankenstein opens with a stack of letters: Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer, writing home to his sister about a stranger he's just pulled from the ice. Everything else in the novel nests inside those letters.
Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day (capture, the session, the turn to structure, revision, output), this one is unusual because two of the five moments happen twice, once in the writer's life and once inside the book: the capture of an idea, and the delivery of a finished manuscript.
Capture
The origin of this novel is one of the better-documented moments in English fiction: in 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori spent an enforced, wet summer at the Villa Diodati and set themselves a challenge to each write a ghost story.
The idea did not come on the spot. Each morning she was asked whether she had thought of a story, and each morning she had to say no. It came at night, in bed, in a waking dream, after a long talk between Byron and Percy Shelley on the principle of life that she had followed almost in silence; the next day she began with "It was on a dreary night of November", the line that now opens Chapter V. The novel then repeats capture as its own structure. Walton writes letters recording his voyage.
Inside those letters, he records Victor's spoken account. Inside that account, Victor records the creature's own spoken story. Each layer catches the one before it and writes it down.
The session
Once underway, the middle moves with real momentum: the creation of the being, its abandonment, the deaths that follow, the pursuit across two countries and finally across the ice.
Little of it pauses. It reads less like scenes returned to over separate sittings and more like one continuous chase, each event triggering the next without much room between them.
The turn to structure
Most novels hide their architecture until partway through, and this one, for all its nesting, does the same. The first page has one narrator, Walton. By the end of the fourth letter he announces he will write down a stranger's story, and Victor's voice takes over. The third voice, the creature's, arrives only in Chapter XI, and his tale, Chapters XI to XVI, fills the middle of the book, from 41% to 62% of its words. The shape shows itself in full where most shapes do, at the midpoint, each narrator aware of being addressed by the one outside him.
Revision
Mary Shelley revised the novel substantially for a new edition published in 1831, adding an introduction that tells the story of the Villa Diodati summer directly to the reader. That revision does more than tidy sentences.
The origin had been in the book since the first edition: the 1818 preface, written by Percy Shelley in the author's voice, told of the summer of 1816 near Geneva and the agreement to "write each a story". What 1831 adds is her own account of how the idea came, and of Percy urging her to make it longer. Not every copy carries it: Project Gutenberg's eBook #84 prints the 1831 novel without the introduction.
Output
The novel returns to its frame for its last pages, about 7% of its words, under the heading "Walton, in continuation". Victor dies on board, pressing Walton's hand. Over his body, the creature announces he will seek "the most northern extremity of the globe" and burn himself on a funeral pile; then he leaps onto an ice-raft and is "lost in darkness and distance". Only the pyre itself is never shown.
The moment meant to deliver a manuscript in the shape a reader expects, an ending that resolves what it opened, is performed in full, and then performed once more inside the story: Victor, finding that Walton has been taking notes on his history, corrects and augments them himself, so that "a mutilated one" should not "go down to posterity".
Capture and output both happen twice here, in the writer's life and again inside the book. Plenty of novels open a frame and close it a few pages from the end; this one does too, and ties off three threads as it goes: Victor's death, the creature's announced one, Walton's turn for home.
The letters that opened the book are still letters when it closes, but the hand writing them has turned for home. A frame closed on the last pages can carry a story as far as an open one.
Try returning to a frame for the last pages, after the inner story has ended, and see whether the nested layers underneath are doing enough work to earn the return.