When Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was 18, she had a dream that would change her life.
Called "the year without a summer" the eruption of Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815 became the largest volcanic eruption in history and sent the climate across Europe haywire.
On holiday in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with close friends, (poet Lord Byron, physician John Polidori and the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) Shelley and the group entertained themselves indoors by reading from a book of ghost stories. Afterwards, Byron set a challenge: they would each write their own ghost stories and vote for the winner.
Shelley based hers on a dream she’d had, writing into her protagonist: "my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free."
Byron described her story as “a wonderful work for a girl” and she decided to write it into a novel. Two years later, in 1818, it was published.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was an instant hit.
Meanwhile, Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, is said to have influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The daughter of feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored the pioneering 1972 protofeminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and anarchistic philosopher William Godwin, Shelley grew up around the London liberal elite.
But Wollstonecraft died when Mary was just a month old, and her father’s new wife was not interested in giving her a formal education. Instead, Shelley taught herself in between home schooling, reading books by her mother’s grave.
She was 16 when she met the the aspiring (and married) poet Percy Shelley and the pair fell in love. But her disapproving father cut her off, so the couple ran away from England and travelled around Europe.
A life peppered with tragedy, Shelley saw her first two children die at an early age, and suffered the suicide of her half-sister. Not long after these losses, the couple went to Switzerland. It is thought the desire to bring back her loved ones inspired many themes in Frankenstein (Shelley's description of the monster awakening reads more like a wish than a reality: “He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold").
By the time Shelley finished the book, she was pregnant again.
A slam-dunk for a first book, Frankenstein is now one of the most popular gothic novels of all time, and it was written by a teenager. Not only that, it sparked an entirely new genre: science fiction and an enduring character, the trope of the mad scientist.
Shelley’s novel tells of a scientist who creates a nameless monster out of cadavers. A metaphor for the danger of hubris, the monster goes on to kill.
It was considered such a masculine novel that when published anonymously (as many women did), people attributed it to her husband.
But the Shelleys were mutually supportive in their work, both editing and promoting one another’s writing and Percy Shelley’s notes were found on early editions of the book for this reason.
To this day, some still believe it could have been written by him.
This incorrect attribution of the novel is not the only blunder that surrounds it, either. Despite what many may think – and several pop-culture blunders – the eponymous Frankenstein is not the monster, but its creator. Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The monster of Shelley’s tale is in fact, nameless.
In 1910 the novel became the subject of one of the first-ever horror films, Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein, and has since inspired several films (Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Show, Young Frankenstein) and stage adaptations.
In 1822 Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. Following his death, the Frankenstein author continued to write, publishing four more novels, short stories, essays, biographies and travel writing as well as compiling collections of her late husband’s poetry.
The daughter of celebrated philosophers and the wife of a revolutionary poet, Mary Shelley more than made a name for herself and thrived without a formal education, becoming a trailblazing writer and a woman in a genre still dominated by men today.
Shelley died of brain cancer aged 53 in 1851.
Mary Shelley is in Curzon Cinemas from today
