The genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is now almost as famous as the novel itself: teenage-runaway Mary Godwin, her married lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their new and infamous friend Lord Byron and his new lover (Mary's half-sister, Claire Clairmont), gather on a stormy evening in the Swiss Alps to read ghost stories; they propose a contest to write their own; Mary has a waking dream several nights later of a student trying to impart a "spark of life" to "the thing he had put together." ... FULL STORY »
