Today I’m choosing author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who gave us Frankenstein.
Shelley, an English writer who was born in 1797, came up with the idea for Frankenstein while holidaying in Lake Geneva with her husband Percy Shelley, her step-sister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron (who’d had an affair with Claire Clairmont and got her pregnant) and Byron’s physician John William Polidori.
The weather was a bit of a washout during their holiday and they spent their evenings entertaining each other with ghost stories. Eventually Byron suggested they should all write a ghost story of their own. And that’s when Shelley began to write Frankenstein. She was only 19 at the time.
I can’t imagine the world of horror without Frankenstein’s monster in it. Shelley inarguably created a timeless monster.
R. H. DIXON 