Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature

During a gathering at the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron proposed to his guests the famous ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre.

A British Romantic poet and political liberal, Lord Byron entertained the Shelley party during the wet, uncongenial summer of 1816. During that time, he and Percy Bysshe Shelley engaged in extended conversations about the “principle of life,” to which Mary Shelley was a silent listener.

One of the leading British Romantic poets and a political radical, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from Oxford University for a scandalous broadside on atheism. He wrote the preface for the first edition of Frankenstein (1818).