Mary Shelley was the product of an extraordinary background.
Her father, William Godwin, is an atheist!
An atheist at that point, the late 18th century, early 19th century,
is an offence against nature.
Her mother is a complete feminist — the progenitor of all feminists.
So whatever happens to this child is going to be extraordinary.
What Britain is dealing with in 1816 is the aftermath of war.
It's what happens when you demobilise an army,
when your munitions factories have to stop,
when you are trying to work out how move from an economy which has been agricultural
to one which is going to become industrial.
Industrial unrest is a real feature of the period in which Mary is writing.
It's a time when people are becoming detached from the natural world
by the Industrial Revolution.
It's the dynamic behind what she's writing about.
It's the meeting of the industrial and the scientific, with the romantic.
That's what creates the spark that is Frankenstein.
Shelley is a vile person back in England.
He's the man who, like Byron,
is suspected of incest,
certainly of carrying away a young girl.
Meeting Shelley is tremendously liberating.
It is the great event of her early life, obviously,
but it crystallises her separation from her family,
and her separation from her father, in particular.
The reason that Mary Shelley arrives in Geneva in 1816
is to do with her complicated family.
She is brought up alongside a step-sister called Claire Clairmont.
When Mary and Shelley elope in 1814 to France, they take Claire with them.
It becomes increasingly tense with the three of them
and Claire decides, at some point in the early spring of 1816,
that she is bored of being the third wheel in Shelley and Mary's relationship
and that she was going to acquire a poet of her own.
So she throws herself at Byron, who is the most famous poet of the day.
Claire therefore decides that she, Shelley and Mary should follow Byron to Europe,
and that they should follow him to Geneva.
The book, Frankenstein, is written in an extraordinary period historically,
but also geographically.
There's a great appeal of Europe, but specifically Switzerland,
as this new republic, the land of William Tell
and of Rousseau, too.
They set up home on the edge of Lake Geneva,
in the Villa Diodati, which is where Milton had stayed.
And of course, Paradise Lost is a key influence on Frankenstein.
But they set up this kind of commune.
It's where the famous events of the summer take place.
It's where, because Byron is the magnet,
other people congregate.
They're like rock stars. Byron is a man who walks around with a condom in his pocket!
There are people hiring telescopes on the other side of the lake,
so people can spy on the wickedness that's going on there.
Byron seems to suggest that everyone should write a ghost story.
This suggestion that they should all write a ghost story
caused something of a panic in her because everyone else gets going
and she can't think of one — every day she's asked and she has to say that she can't.
Until one night, she has what she describes as a "waking dream"
in which she sees a vision of her novel in a kind of hallucinatory state.
She's able to emerge the next morning and announce that she had thought of a story.
You have a sense, reading the account of it, as it being extremely intense.
Thunder storms echo around the lake.
Europe, in fact, experiences one of its worst summers ever.
Crops fail all over Europe. There's huge unrest as a result.
What that means for Mary is that she is sitting watching Lake Geneva
as lightning and thunder echoes around the mountains and around the lake.
It's tremendously dramatic.
The sheer frenzied, almost drug-like state that they work themselves up into,
Frankenstein is really born out of a hyper-tense state.
Later, when they leave Geneva and they return to Bath to live for the winter
and Mary starts to write the novel in earnest, terrible events happen.
Mary by this point had given birth to a child. She had also lost a child.
She had lost her mother.
She had come to terms with being the daughter of a woman who is a social outcast.
She has become so caught up in what she's writing,
she really does enter a different zone in this book.
All these things are caught up in this one tragic,
pathetic, innocent, ugly, beautiful creature.
It is suggesting that creation need not be divinely inspired.
You can't write something much more shocking than that in 1818.
It's completely heretical.
You might as well have gone up to the Archbishop of Canterbury
and slapped him in the face!
Which is what this book does, in a way.
The novel was published anonymously in 1818.
It's not particularly unusual, at that stage, for novels to appear anonymously.
People often talk about the fact that she's very young when she writes it — 18, 19.
I think that's one of the reasons it has the quality it has.
It's a novel written by someone who is still in the process of working out
what they think about the world.
News of its authorship does gradually leak out
and it is reissued in 1831,
so several years after the first publication, and after Shelley had died.
This preface, written for the 1831 edition,
situates the work of the novel of someone who was much younger,
of someone whose life has passed.
By this point, it was crucially important for Mary to rehabilitate her reputation
so she could earn a living for herself and for her child.
It's a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, it means that she has a reputation
and she was able to build a literary career for herself.
On the other, you can never quite escape having been the author of Frankenstein.
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