Book Club: SHE: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

Frankenstein was conceived by the 18-year old Mary Shelley while she was with her stepsister Claire Clairmont, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron’s physician John Polidori. The setting was grey Geneva, in  1816,  a  ‘year without a summer’ when the volcanic ash of a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia blotted out the sun, wreaking havoc across the globe’s climate system. Crops failed, livestock died, famine was widespread, and the apocalypse appeared nigh — a perfect setting for a ghost story competition.

Unable to go boating or walking the vacationers had time enough to write. Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, her “hideous progeny” as she called it — the moving tale of the mad scientist Frankenstein and his abandoned, unnamed creature. While the poetry of Shelley and Byron has faded in modern sensibility, Frankenstein remains one of the world’s most popular and admired books.