In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, which was originally published anonymously in 1818 and which over the intervening years (thanks partly to a series of low-comedy theatrical adaptations) had become a bestseller, Mary Shelley offered a persuasive and romantic explanation of how her book came to be written. The account of where and how Mary Shelley’s novel originated may be among the most famous creation stories in literature; we know, or think we know, the circumstances and the pressures under which a very young woman turned a sort of parlor game into a book that would long outlive her.



It was the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old. Two years before, she had fallen in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a frequent visitor to the home of her father, William Godwin, the political radical, freethinker, novelist, and, most famously, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Mary’s mother, the equally radical and perhaps even more unconventional Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a protofeminist work that emphasized the importance of educating females. Before conquering her disapproval of the institution of marriage in order to marry Godwin, who shared her opinion of state-sanctioned wedlock, Mary Wollstonecraft borne an illegitimate daughter, Fanny, to an American entrepreneur and cad named Gilbert Imlay, whom she had met in Paris, where she had gone to observe, firsthand, the aftermath of the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft died of an infection, within days of giving birth to her second daughter, Mary.

Having reversed his position on marriage, Godwin wed again. Mary Godwin despised her new stepmother, who brought to the household her own children: Charles and Jane, a high-strung, impulsive girl, two years younger than Mary. Jane, who would later rechristen herself Claire, flirted intensely with Shelley and was, for much of Mary Shelley’s early married life, the bane of her existence.

When he began visiting Godwin, Shelley was married and the father of a child. Nonetheless, he and Mary fell passionately in love, and they eloped and—together with fifteen-year-old Jane—left London for the Continent. What followed was a difficult period, its sufferings mediated only by the deepening of the young couple’s love. The emotionally volatile threesome traveled semiconstantly, under adverse conditions and nearly always on the verge of destitution. Mary gave birth to a baby, a daughter who was born prematurely and died after a few days.

Eventually Mary, Percy, and Jane (now Claire) came to rest at a cottage on the shores of Lac Leman in Switzerland, not far from where Lord Byron, who had become Claire’s lover, was staying, at the Villa Diodati. The group—Percy and Mary, Byron and Claire, and Byron’s physician, John William Polidori—had planned on spending the summer enjoying the beauties of the landscape and the lake. But when the weather turned cold and rainy—a volcanic eruption had turned it into one of the most inclement summers in European history—they sought another way to amuse themselves.