It is one of the most famous novels of all time, often cited as the first work of science fiction, with a genesis almost as well known as its terrifying central character.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus was published 200 years ago in 1818, when she was just 21. It was the result of a challenge laid down in 1816 by Lord Byron, when Shelley and her lover – later her husband – Byron’s fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley were holidaying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
The party had hoped for good weather, but the eruption of a volcano in the East Indies in 1815, the greatest event of its kind in recorded history, had ushered in three years of bone-chilling cold that killed crops and cast a shadow across Europe. As they huddled for warmth around a fire one night, Byron suggested each of them should write a horror story.
For days Shelley suffered writer’s block until she came up with the idea of a scientist who reanimated a creature stitched together from body parts, only to be horrified by his success.
Source : theguardian
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