Horror

Mary Shelley and her Creature

Over two hundred years ago this June, 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sat in a hotel on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, in a relentless cold rain caused by bizarre weather from a massive volcanic eruption half a world away. Vacationing with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; her stepsister, Claire Clairmont; and the poet Lord Byron, Mary Shelley dreamed up her Gothic novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” in response to a parlor game challenge to beat the boredom brought on by vacation cabin fever. In the two centuries since, the novel has been taught worldwide, adapted into every possible art form, infused into popular culture and used to kick-start conversations on themes ranging from religion to law, from science to art. The text has been modernized, modified and misunderstood (people have often mistakenly called the creature “Frankenstein,” for example), and yet the book remains enduringly relevant for the universal questions it raises on the nature of human existence. (NYTimes. Teaching Frankenstein with the New York Times by Caroline Gilpin. Feb. 15, 2017.)

From her novel: "The laboratory was dark that November evening. The young scientist watched the still body on the table, peering through shadows thrown by flickering candlelight. And then, through the gloom, he “saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open” and its limbs begin to twitch."