In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
visited Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva Switzerland. The Villa Diodati
and her lover. the poet Percy Shelley
(whom she married later that year)
Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories.
One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.
(The Complete Text)
