Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron's.

About the Author:
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851), daughter of political radical William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, grew up among the leading voices of the Romantic movement. She met and wed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816. When the Shelleys spent that summer on Lake Geneva with friends—among them, Lord Byron—Byron challenged the writers to a ghost-story contest. Mary Shelley's sketch inspired her novel Frankenstein (1818), influenced by her loss of her infant daughter in 1815. Four years after Frankenstein's publication, her husband drowned. The tragedy haunted Shelley for the rest of her life, which she dedicated to annotating her husband's writing, publishing her own novels, and revising Frankenstein for republication.