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Regardless of what Hollywood would like you to think, there was no flash of lightning, no bolt through the head, no scientist yelling "It is alive! ," without a flat-top haircut. Throughout the summer of 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwinwas hanging outside at a Swiss lake home with her fan and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley; renowned English poet, Lord Byron; along with Byron's doctor John Polidori.

(And a few others, but these are the essential names.)

Thus, you're bored out of your skull at a lakeside villa with just two of the most well-known authors in all of English literature.

You own a ghost story contest.

Lord Byron challenged everyone to compose the funniest, freakiest, spookiest story they can come up with. Polidori came up with The Vampyre, one of the very first sexy vampire stories from the English language. Byron wrote a couple of fragments.

Let's back up for a second: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wasn't only any eighteen-year-old. She was the daughter of 2 critically clever folks: Mary Wollstonecraft, that composed basically the very first work of English feminism in history (not to mention a lot of political doctrine about human rights generally); and William Godwin, an atheist, anarchist, and radical who wrote novels and essays attacking conservatism along with the aristocracy (and whose Caleb Williams likely influenced Frankenstein). Just envision their dinner table conversations.

Our purpose is, Mary Godwin wasn't some woman writing gothic fan fiction within her LiveJournal. She could have been only eighteen, but she was severely engaging with important academic questions of the time, for example:

If there be limitations to scientific inquiry?
What's the relationship between individual rationality and individual emotion?
The result was Frankenstein, a horror story about what happens when one person's need for scientific discovery and immortality goes horribly wrong--and what happens to society's outcasts. With Percy's assistance (along with the assistance of his extensive terminology, whether she asked for it or not), she enlarged her brief story into a novel and published it in 1818.

The critics did not just go crazy, however, it was popular enough to be republished as a one-volume edition in 1831. Only Shelley wasn't the identical bright-eyed 21 year old she had been in 1818. From 1831, she had lost her husband and two of her kids, along with the revised edition has a grimmer tone. From the 1831 text, character is a harmful machine; Victor is a victim of destiny, not free will; and households aren't so far happy and inviting as claustrophobic and oppressive. She made numerous adjustments, in reality, that there's a real question about which version we should be reading.

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