"The Woman Who Wrote Frankenstein"
Outside the Villa Diodati in Switzerland the storm was raging. As Mary Shelley later described it, "The lake was lit up . . . when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness." Inside the villa's gracious drawing room, Mary joined the other guests: her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their friend, George Gordon, Lord Byron, who was also a celebrated poet, Mary's stepsister, Claire, and Lord Byron's doctor, John William Polidori.
During the storm, Lord Byron entertained his companions by reading them ghost stories. The rain beating against the roof, the lightening streaking across the sky, and the thunder rattling the window panes created the perfect atmosphere. Mary, in particular, was listening so intently that she jumped when Byron slammed the book shut and announced "We will each write a ghost story!"
The events that followed changed the history of English literature. Of the five who gathered on that stormy night in June, 1816, only one took Lord Byron's invitation to heart. At nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley longed to be taken as seriously as a writer as was her husband and their friend. She struggled for days to think of a story that would "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature," that would "curdle the blood and quicken the beating of the heart." At last an idea began taking shape. Who could have predicted that it would become the basis for one of the most famous horror stories ever written?
Less than a year later, on May 14, 1817, Mary finished the manuscript. Finding a publisher for it, however, proved difficult. Two publishing houses rejected the work before an editor at a third agreed to publish it, thinking perhaps that Percy Shelley was himself the author. Ten months later, Frankenstein appeared, though the identity of the author for the time being remained a secret. It was inconceivable to the English public in the early years of the nineteenth century that a woman could have written such a tale!
Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, Mary's novel was cobbled together from various sources. She based it in part on the myth of Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from heaven and gave it to human beings. This act so outraged the other gods that they severely punished Prometheus. For Mary, Dr. Frankenstein was "the modern Prometheus."
She also incorporated into the work places she had visited, people she knew, and events and personalities of the time. Her husband, for instance, was the model for the character of Dr. Frankenstein. Information acquired from her reading helped to bring the story to life. The possibility of a man creating a monster from the body parts of dead people derived from newspaper accounts of "resurrection men" who robbed graves and sold cadavers to surgeons for research. Finally, Mary's own feelings of grief at the deaths of her mother and her infant daughter found their way into her work.
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