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What Mary Shelley did in the shadows - Engelsberg ideas

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Bath was, for Mary Shelley, a sanctuary and a retreat from the world, a place of refinement and confinement, where she wrestled with, and channelled, her private sorrows. Mary Shelley in Bath, introduced by Fiona Sampson, Manderley Press, £19.99 The birth of Frankenstein has become the stuff of literary legend. In 1816, the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – not yet Mary Shelley – travelled to Switzerland with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby son William and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. The unseasonably bad weather frequently kept them indoors at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron was staying with his friend and physician William Polidori. To pass the time on rainy days and stormy nights, Byron would read his guests a selection of hair-raising, spine-chilling German stories. On 16 June he suggested that each member of the group should try their own hand at writing a terrifying tale. Polidori promptly got t

What Mary Shelley did in the shadows - Engelsberg ideas Reviews What Mary Shelley did in the shadows May 14, 2025 Malcolm Forbes Themes: Books , Culture Bath was, for Mary Shelley, a sanctuary and a retreat from the world, a place of refinement and confinement, where she wrestled with, and channelled, her private sorrows. The English novelist Mary Shelley. Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo Mary Shelley in Bath , introduced by Fiona Sampson, Manderley Press, £19.99 The birth of Frankenstein has become the stuff of literary legend. In 1816, the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’, 18-year

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