what is the background of mary shelly towards writing the book frankenstein?

Answer 1

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor vacation activities they had planned, so after reading Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori to each compose a story of their own, the contest being won by whoever wrote the scariest tale.

Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein.

Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, the Frankenstein and vampire themes were created from that single circumstance.

Answer 2

After she, her husband and friends sat up one night making up ghost stories, Mary abruptly woke up from a nightmare.

“My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie…I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together—I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” --Mary Godwin Shelley

By the way she also received an excellent education from private tutors which was unusual for women of her day. And, the fact that she had a wonderful relationship with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, kept her highly motivated in a personal world filled with writers and artists.

Answer 3

Well we did it in English and we were reading it from a sheet. I'm not sure where you can get it but have a look around cos it is definitely there.

Answer 4

Some friends, her, and her husband were telling stories one night and that was the story she started to tell.

Answer 5

I thought it started from a nightmare