Mary Godwin was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Her parents were famous writers and political radicals. In 1814, she began an affair with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They eloped to Europe and in the summer of 1816 they joined Shelley’s fellow poet Lord Byron in Geneva. Most evenings, Mary and Percy would meet with Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont (Mary’s step-sister), and a young doctor named John Polidari. They would talk deep into the night. Sometimes they told German ghost stories. One of those nights, Byron suggested they have a competition where each would write a ghost story. Mary tried hard, but after a few days was becoming frustrated with her lack of ideas. At another of their late night sessions, she brought up the topic of the reanimation of life. Upon going to bed, she found she could not sleep and in what she later described as a “waking dream”, the idea for a story came to her. She imagined a scientist bringing a corpse back to life and the horrible consequences of his act. For two years she worked on the story, encouraged by her husband. In 1818, she published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It was an instant hit. She was only 17 when she came up with the story. Also resulting from that night’s competition was Polidari’s “The Vampyre” which is considered the first vampire story published in English.
– maroon 25
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