| MARY SHELLY |
| Mary Shelley spent the greater part of the summer of 1816, when she was nineteen, at the Chapuis in Geneva, Switzerland. The weather went from being beautiful and radiant to tempestous. Rains and incredible lightning storms plagued the area, similar to the summer that Mary was born. This incredible change was due to the volcano, Tambora, in Indonesia. The weather, as well as the company (Fanny Imlay,Claire Clairmont, Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician) and the Genevan district, contributed to the genesis of Frankenstein. On the night of June 16th, Mary and Percy could not return to Chapuis, due to an incredible storm, and spent the night at the Villa Diodati with Byron and John Polidori. The group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, The Fantasmagoriana. In one of the stories, a group travelers relate to the another supernatural experiences that they ahd experienced. This inspired Lord Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story. On the June 22nd, Byron and Shelley were scheduled to take a boat trip around the lake. The night before their departure the group discussed a subject from "whether the principle of life could be discovered and whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of manifactured humaniod." When Mary went to bed, she had a "waking" nightmare. The next morning Mary realized she had found her story and began writing the lines that open-"It was on a dreary night in November"- She completed the novel in May of 1817 and was published January 1, 1818 |
