The Year Without Summer and the Origins of Frankenstein
How Mary Shelley’s Classic Novel Started With a Challenge From Friends During a Grim and Gray Summer
June 1816.
A group of friends is gathered at the Villa Diodati, a mansion near Lake Geneva in Switzerland
Among the gathering is Lord Byron, the poet Percy Shelley, and the 18-year-old daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
Though it should have been summer, it wasn’t. 1816 was “The Year Without Summer.” The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia had filled the atmosphere with ash. There were subzero temperatures in New York that May. There were massive food shortages all over the frighteningly cold northern hemisphere.
It was cold and foggy in Switzerland. So much so that the friends gathered at Villa Diodati spent three days straight indoors, trying to find ways to entertain each other.
It was Percy Shelley who suggested they have a contest to see who could write the best ghost story.
If you know this story, and I expect many of you do, you know that the friends did embark on Percy’s challenge, and that it was out of this challenge that young Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley, following her marriage to Percy) wrote a story that became one of the most influential works in the history of literature. In the process of finishing the challenge her friends set out for her, Mary invented the science fiction novel, set the stage for the entire genre of horror, created the story that would become the prototype for a thousand monster movies, opened the door on the gothic tradition in literature, and ensured her place in literary history forever.
When you read Frankenstein, right away the book hits you with its marvelous contrast between atmosphere and spirit. We are lucky, I think, that we got this story out of Mary when she was so young. The story is blazing hot with energy and inventive spirit, even as it gives us a world where nature feels cold and unforgiving, as it surely must have felt in 1816, The Year Without Summer.
Postscript: Also a product of that cold summer on Lake Geneva was a short story titled The Vampyre, written by Lord Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. How serendipitous that both Frankenstein and the modern vampire trope were both invented by the same group of friends during the same miserable summer.
