Gracefully sweeping through the dramatic life of the woman behind history's most legendary monster, Miranda Seymour unbuttons a world of brilliant literary figures in Mary Shelley and re-creates the imaginative time in which Frankenstein was born. The itinerant life of Mary Shelley began when she escaped the continent at age sixteen with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, her reputation in ruins. With Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont in tow, they traveled from England to Switzerland to stifling Italy in the summer. In 1816 they rented a villa near Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva where, in a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, they told ghost stories and tales of horror. From that night emerged the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years.
