In June 1816, five young people were kept indoors by the rain in two houses on Lake Geneva. One of them suggested a contest. Two of the stories it produced are still with us: Frankenstein, and the vampire.
In April 1815 the volcano Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, erupted with a force not seen in recorded history. Its ash dimmed the sun around the world, and 1816 became the "Year Without a Summer": snow in New England in June, failed harvests across Europe, and on Lake Geneva, storm after storm.
Lord Byron, the most famous poet in Europe, had left England that spring in a cloud of scandal. He rented the Villa Diodati, a grand house above the lake at Cologny, just outside Geneva, and brought his young doctor, John Polidori. Just down the slope, in a smaller house, were the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, who would marry him at the end of the year, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont.
Mary remembered it fifteen years later, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein:
To pass the evenings they read aloud from a book of German ghost stories in French translation (the collection known as Fantasmagoriana). Mary never forgot two of them: a faithless lover who embraces his bride and finds himself holding the ghost of the woman he abandoned, and a giant phantom in armour who kisses the sleeping sons of his family, who wither from that hour. Then Byron made his proposal.
The four were Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Mary. It was a challenge among friends, not a wager, and it did not go the way anyone expected. The two great poets soon gave up. Byron began a tale about a mysterious traveller who dies in a Turkish graveyard, and abandoned it. Shelley began one based on his own early life. Polidori, Mary wrote, had "some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady" who was punished for peeping through a keyhole, and did not know what to do with her.
Mary could think of nothing. Every morning someone asked whether she had thought of a story, and every morning, she wrote, she had to answer no.
One night she sat listening to Byron and Shelley talk about the nature of life itself: whether it could ever be discovered and created. They spoke of experiments said to have been done by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and of galvanism, the electrical twitching of dead muscle that scientists had been demonstrating on frogs, and even on the bodies of executed criminals. Perhaps, they wondered, a corpse might be brought back to life.
It was after midnight when she went to bed, and she could not sleep.
She saw the "hideous phantasm of a man" stir into life, and its maker run from it in horror, and wake to find it standing at his bed, looking at him. She opened her eyes in terror, and then understood what she had.
The next day she began writing, with the words that now open Chapter 5: "It was on a dreary night of November." She meant it to be a short tale. Percy Shelley urged her to make it longer. Eighteen months later, on 1 January 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published, without her name on it.
Polidori's diary, which survives, records the evenings too. On one of them Byron recited lines from Coleridge's unpublished poem "Christabel", and Shelley ran screaming from the room, overcome by a sudden vision.
Polidori took Byron's abandoned fragment, the traveller who dies in a graveyard, and turned it into a story of his own. The Vampyre appeared in a London magazine in April 1819, printed as Byron's work. Its vampire, Lord Ruthven, is not a peasant corpse from folklore but a cold, fascinating aristocrat who moves through high society, and he was plainly modelled on Byron himself. Byron, annoyed, published his own fragment at the end of his poem Mazeppa to show what he had really written.
The Vampyre was a sensation. Its gentleman vampire passed into stage plays, into the penny serial Varney the Vampire (1845–47), into Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), and in 1897 into the Transylvanian count who came to London: Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The summer's young writers did not have long. Polidori died in 1821, aged 25. Percy Shelley drowned in a storm off the Italian coast in 1822, and Byron died of fever in Greece in 1824. Mary lived until 1851 and wrote many more books, but when she looked back on that summer in 1831 she was the only one of the four still alive. She ended her introduction by bidding her "hideous progeny" go forth and prosper. It has.