You never know what might happen when you go to Lord Byron’s house…
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In 1816 at the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four houseguests—Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori—and challenges each to write a ghost story, which culminates in Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
“At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores,” Mary Shelley later wrote in an introduction to Frankenstein; it was only Byron who was getting any writing done. “But it proved a wet, ungenial summer,” she wrote, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” (In fact, 1816 would later become known as the Year Without a Summer, because of the effects of the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora the previous year—it would have been bizarrely cold and a little frightening.) One day in this un-June-like June, Percy, Mary, Lord Byron, and the writer John Polidori were holed up in Byron’s Villa Diodati, reading ghost stories to each other (in translation, natch), when Byron, inspired, challenged each of them to write their own dark tale. Over the next three days, storms raging outside, they each attempted to rise to Byron’s demand.
“I busied myself to think of a story,” Mary wrote.
—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which 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. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
But then, as she slept one night, it came to her: “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie,” she wrote. “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” (The exact hour of this vision has been pinpointed by astronomers: it was between 2 am and 3 am on the morning of June 16. Which seems like exactly the time you’d expect a good idea for a horror story to come to a writer, especially such a goth one.)
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