Few creatures of horror have seized reader's imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horro and suspense. Considering the novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron's
"We will each wirte a ghost story" Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Swithzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet, Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continual rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed ot Byron's proposal.
The Illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories. But Mary Shelley rose supermely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirbly in the task the set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "Would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.