Jane Dunn is a historian, biographer, and author. Her most recent book, A Lady’s Fortune, is an irresistible, glittering romance set during the Regency era!
During a cold, wet and windy summer in 1816, the Romantic poets, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, gathered at Byron’s Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with Percy’s wife-to-be, Mary, and Byron’s doctor Polidori. The eruption of a huge volcano the previous year had resulted in a Volcanic Winter and the rain was incessant: in June the youthful party stayed at the villa for three days, reading ghost stories that impressed them greatly and made them determined to try and write their own.
Byron dashed off a fragment that Dr Polidori turned into a tale of a vampire, the first in existence, which was remarkable enough, but it was Mary, a mere girl of eighteen, who really exceeded all expectations. She was thrilled at the idea that she might write something worthy of her illustrious parentage; her mother the first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father, the radical philosopher, William Godwin. She recalled that she searched for an idea which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaking thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.
That night she had a nightmarish waking dream: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together…He sleeps: but he is awakened; he opens his eyes: behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside…looking at him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. She woke to realise she had found her ghost story. Exhilarated, she realised that what had terrified her would terrify others and she sat down to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The first words she scratched with a quill and ink were: It was on a dreary night in November…
The weather improved and Shelley and Byron set off to explore the majestic mountains, but Mary remained and continued with her story. It was published in 1818, initially, the publishers obscured the fact that a woman was the author, so shocking was its content. But Mary had produced one of the greatest and most famous works of fiction in the world, the mother of Science Fiction and a unique work of soaring gothic and metaphysical imagination.
Her Dr Frankenstein has been confused by modern interpretations, mostly through film, with the creature he created, who has no name. There have been countless spin-offs, spoofs, and schlock-porn and horror movies. But what Mary Shelley had created was a moving exploration of loneliness and longing for home and love; the responsibility of the scientist; the presumption of Man in thinking he could trespass into God’s domain and create life; the very question of what it is to be alive. She managed to awaken thrilling horror with one of the most original stories ever created, but she also questioned what it was to be human. That Regency summer produced. two extraordinary supernatural creatures; the Vampire and Frankenstein’s manufactured man. On Halloween Night, we have many reasons to thank those brilliant young people and the exceptionally stormy weather that June in 1816.
