Byron’s menagerie of dogs, monkeys and peacocks added a terrified chorus. So this summer, when the weather was preventing them from exploring the lakes and mountains, they went up to the Villa Diodati, where they and Byron huddled around the fires and read to each other by candlelight while the storms rattled the curtains. Apart from their love of the classics, the young people shared a passion for gothic stories, horror and the paranormal. Even the fifth person of the group, Byron’s doctor was only 20.

Mary and and her step sister, Claire who was with them, were still teenagers and Shelley was in his early 20s. Lord Byron wrote an apocalyptic poem called Darkness, where ‘the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air ’. There were visible sunspots on the sun, crop failures and famine and widespread predictions of the end of the world. In the middle of summer it was sunless with thunderstorms. A volcano had a erupted in Indonesia, Mount Tabora, and had spewed ash across most of Europe and even America, but no one knew that at the time. That year, 1816, was also known as the Year Without a Summer. Because of this heritage, Mary was expected both by her father and husband to produce a work of literary genius. Her father was William Godwin, and he was a celebrated philosopher of the day daily known for a book called Political Justice.

She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a noted and notorious thinker and advocate, who we mainly know today as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Two years later she and her family were staying in the villa next door to Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva and the eighteen year old Mary had something to prove. They were living off loans and a meagre income from Shelley's publications.

They had a new baby, Shelley’s father, the baronet, had disowned him, and Shelley had an abandoned wife and two children to support. Mary Shelley, when she began Frankenstein in the cold summer of 1816, had all three motivations.Īt sixteen she had eloped with the poet, Shelley, and they were certainly living beyond their means. Writers need to be tough and strongly motivated: they typically to have a need to tell a story, to prove something about themselves, or to pursue a need of money. The chances of being endlessly rejected by publishers, even worse, by the public, and ending up on the remainder table are and have always been high. Novel writing has always been a very uncertain enterprise.

Almost Invincible by Suzanne Burdon