6. Mary Shelley had a nightmare that turned into Frankenstein
The daughter of the nineteenth-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley found her own fame as an author amidst the scandal of her personal life. She had an affair with the married Percy Shelley, who abandoned his wife for Mary. Living together as husband and wife, Percy and Mary visited their friend Lord Byron in Switzerland during the rainy summer of 1816. Joined by other friends and acquaintances, the party shared ghost stories to pass the time. One night, Lord Byron suggested that each of the writers develop their own ghost story.
Mary struggled to think of a scary story. One night, after the party’s discussion on whether or not a corpse could come back to life through electric shock, she dreamed of a man who did just that. Using what she saw in her dream, Mary wrote the beginnings of Frankenstein. Percy inspired her to develop her idea, and Mary expanded her short story into a novel over the next year, publishing it anonymously in January 1818.
Mary Shelley’s focus on death in her work isn’t surprising. After her mother died in childbirth eleven days after she was born, Mary lost most of her friends and family to tragic circumstances. Both her sister Fanny and Percy Shelley’s first wife committed suicide, and only one of her five children with her husband survived childhood. After they moved to northern Italy, Percy Shelley drowned during a boating trip in 1822. For the rest of her life, Mary consistently published her writing, which ranged from novels and short stories to biographies and essays. They didn’t bring her the success of Frankenstein, which has consistently remained in print for two hundred years.