HISTORY OF MARY SHELLEY AND FRANKENSTEIN

On a rainy evening in 1816, Mary Shelley and 3 of her friends sat around a fire and read Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'histoires d'apparitions de spectres, revenants, fantômes, etc. (1812), a French translation of a German book of ghost stories, which soon sparked their interest in writing a horror story. While the other 3 of her friends immediately began to create horror stories, Shelley was stuck; she wanted to write a story "which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."

Then one evening, after discussing galvanism and Erasmus Darwin's success in voluntarily moving vermicello (a worm), Shelley had a sudden inspiration and dreamt she say a "pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together."  She knew that "to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" by giving a "spark of life" to a "hideous corpse" was terrible and horrific story within itself and challenged the ongoings of the time period. And on the very next day, Shelley began her novel,  Frankenstein.

Throughout Frankenstein, there are many references to Paradise Lost  by John Milton, an epic rendition of the biblical Genesis, where Mary Shelley explores the theme of creation.  "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?--," an excerpt from Milton's novel, serves as an inspiration to Shelley's novel. Even within Frakenstein, one of the novels that the monster begins to read is one of Milton's poems. This concept of creating, neglecting, and destroying life, present in Paradise Lost intrigued Shelley, and her novel unfolded on such premises.

Also, when reading the novel, there are many links between dates, names and events that complement those in Mary Shelley's life. Once concept is that the novel also came from "doubled fear, the fear of a woman that she may not be able to bear a healthy normal child and the fear of a putative author that she may not be able to write.... the book is her created self as well as her child.", which is validated in that the book was written during Shelley's third pregnancy. Another reference to Shelley's l ife is that the monster in her novel awakes on the same date that Shelley was born, and the time that the novel ends also correlates to the date on which Shelley's mother dies.