Frankenstein grew from a collision of forces: a volcanic apocalypse that trapped a group of writers indoors, a dare to write ghost stories, cutting-edge electrical experiments on dead bodies, and the deep personal grief of a young woman who lost her mother to childbirth. No single spark created the novel. Mary Shelley pulled from the science, literature, climate, and tragedy surrounding her to produce one of the most influential stories ever written.
The Year Without a Summer
In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history. The massive cloud of ash and sulfur spread through the atmosphere and disrupted global weather patterns for more than a year. By the summer of 1816, snow was falling in New England and cold, relentless rain soaked Europe. Temperatures dropped so dramatically that the period became known as “The Year Without a Summer.”
That same summer, 18-year-old Mary Godwin (she would later marry Percy Bysshe Shelley) was vacationing with a small group at Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The group included Percy Shelley, the famous poet Lord Byron, Byron’s personal physician John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. The weather was miserable. Constant rain and gloomy skies kept them confined indoors at Byron’s rented Villa Diodati for days at a stretch, and the dark, oppressive atmosphere seeped into everything they discussed and eventually created.
Byron’s Ghost Story Challenge
To pass the time, the group read aloud from a French collection of German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana. One evening, Byron proposed a challenge: each person should attempt to write a story that could rival the tales in the book. Everyone took up the dare, with wildly different results.
Byron produced an atmospheric but unfinished vampire fragment. Polidori picked up that idea and turned it into “The Vampyre,” a short story about a ruthless aristocrat who bore more than a passing resemblance to Byron himself. That story is now considered the first modern vampire tale in English literature. Percy Shelley didn’t produce fiction from the contest but wrote two significant poems that summer, “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”
Mary struggled at first. She couldn’t settle on an idea that satisfied her. But eventually she pieced together an outline for a story about a scientist who artificially creates a human being, one that brings tragedy into his life. That outline became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the most enduring work to emerge from Byron’s contest and the most famous creation of Mary Shelley’s career.
Galvanism and the Science of Reanimation
The science behind Frankenstein wasn’t pure fantasy. It was rooted in real experiments that had fascinated and horrified the European public for decades. In the late 1700s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered that electrical current could make the legs of dead frogs twitch. He flayed dead frogs, connected their exposed leg nerves to each other, and watched the legs jump. This was the first serious evidence that a kind of electricity specific to living bodies flowed through limbs to animate them. Later researchers built on this work, going so far as to stack multiple frog legs into what amounted to a biological battery, proving that the electricity intrinsic to animals was genuinely biological in origin.
The experiments didn’t stop with frogs. In 1803, Italian professor Giovanni Aldini performed a public demonstration at the Royal College of Surgeons in London on the body of George Foster, a man who had just been executed for murder. Aldini applied electrical arcs to various parts of the corpse. Foster’s jaw quivered. His left eye opened. His face convulsed. One hand clenched, and his heart contracted, giving what onlookers described as “an appearance of reanimation.” The experiments continued for more than seven hours after the execution. The Times of London reported that a principle had been discovered “by which motion can be restored to Dead Bodies.”
These demonstrations created enormous public anxiety about the boundary between life and death. People already feared being buried alive, and now scientists seemed to be suggesting they could reverse death altogether. Mary Shelley was well aware of these experiments. Though she deliberately avoided describing Victor Frankenstein’s exact methods in the novel, she made it clear he used “the unleashed powers of electricity and galvanism” to breathe life into his creation. Victor himself describes his goal as infusing “a spark of being into the lifeless thing which lay at my feet.”
Prometheus and Paradise Lost
Shelley didn’t just draw on science. She wove two major literary traditions into the novel’s DNA. The first is right there in the subtitle: The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, then suffered eternal punishment for his transgression. Victor Frankenstein follows the same arc. He steals the power of creation from nature, uses lightning to animate the lifeless, and is destroyed by the consequences. Both Prometheus and Frankenstein discover too late the destructive cost of their ambitions. Shelley reinforced this parallel throughout the novel, using lightning repeatedly as a symbol for forbidden knowledge.
The second literary pillar is John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the 17th-century epic poem about the fall of Satan and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The very first edition of Frankenstein in 1818 carried a quote from Paradise Lost on its title page: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay / To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” Those are Adam’s words to God, and they perfectly capture the creature’s anguish toward Victor. Scholars have noted that the creature begins the novel as a kind of Adam, a newly created being seeking love and connection. But after repeated rejection, he degenerates into a Satan figure, the adversary of his own creator. The creature himself makes this explicit: “I am the fallen angel,” he says. “The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
Grief, Motherhood, and Loss
Beneath the science and mythology lies something deeply personal. Mary Shelley’s life was shaped by death from the very beginning. Her mother, the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days after giving birth to her, most likely from an infection introduced during delivery. Shelley’s first connection to medicine was through an act meant to welcome life that instead caused death.
By the time she sat down at Villa Diodati, Shelley had already lost her first child, a daughter who died in infancy. She would go on to lose two more children in the years that followed. Scholars have read Frankenstein as an attempt to process this accumulated grief: the wish to reverse death, the fear of repeating loss, and the isolation that comes when mourning cannot be shared. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein is spurred toward his experiments by his own mother’s sudden death. His obsession with mastering life and death mirrors Shelley’s lifelong entanglement with both. The novel is, at its core, a meditation on how easily the impulse to create and the capacity to destroy can become intertwined.
How the Story Changed Over Time
Shelley published the original Frankenstein anonymously in 1818, when she was just 20 years old. Thirteen years later, she revised the novel significantly for a new edition in 1831, and the differences between the two versions reveal how profoundly her outlook had shifted. By 1831, she had lost not only her mother and children but also her husband Percy, who drowned in 1822. Byron was dead. Close friendships had collapsed.
These losses reshaped her understanding of the story. In the 1818 version, Victor Frankenstein has free will. He could have abandoned his quest, cared for his creature, or protected the people he loved. He chose not to, and that made his downfall a moral failure. In the 1831 revision, Shelley stripped away much of that agency. Victor becomes a pawn of forces beyond his control, driven by fate and chance rather than choice. Lightning strikes at just the right moment to spark his interest in electricity. A random “caprice of the mind” redirects his studies. “Thus strangely are our souls constructed,” the revised Victor reflects, “and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.”
In her new introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley presented herself much the same way: as someone compelled to write by her parents’ legacy, Byron’s challenge, and Percy’s expectations. Her imagination, she wrote, “unbidden, possessed and guided” her. The woman who had once written a novel about the consequences of human choice now saw herself, like her protagonist, as a product of circumstances she never controlled.