Frankenstein

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 to the writer Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, a well-known anarchist and atheist writer. In 1814, when she was sixteen, she fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and they eloped to France. In 1816 the couple travelled to Lake Geneva to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron. Mary was inspired to write her Gothic tale Frankenstein after Byron arranged a ghost story competition during their stay. Completed when Mary was only nineteen, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever published.