Mary Shelley 
Frankenstein 

A story of origin almost as famous as the book itself: a bleak summer on the shore of Lake Geneva, amid controversies of galvanism and deceptive and mantled readings from a collection of German ghost stories, Lord Byron suggested a play. Each of her guests – eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin and her future husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, would do their best while writing a supernatural story between them. Unable to think of a plot at first, Mary visited a sleepless night, with a horrific vision of a corpse, a “hideous fantasy of a man” ; Responsible, a “pale disciple of austere arts, ” fled out of fear of his creation and returned to the dead substance in which he was born. But the beast is not dead. He followed the man to the bedside table.