[Music] well Mary Shelly was the kind of pro of an extraordinary background really I mean her Father William godman is an atheist I mean an atheist at that point you know the late 18th century early 19th century is an offense against nature um her mother is a complete feminist you know she is the progenitor of all feminists so really whatever happens to this child is going to be extraordinary what Britain is dealing with in 1816 is the aftermath of War what happens when you demobilize an army when your Munitions factories have to stop when you
are trying to work out how to move from an economy which has essentially been agricultural to one which is going to become industrial and Industrial unrest is a real feature of the period in which Mary is is writing because it's time when people are becoming detached from the from the natural world by the Industrial Revolution it's the dynamic behind what she's writing about um and it is the meeting of the industrial and the scientific with the Romantic that's that's what creates the spark that is Frankenstein shell is a vile person back in England you know
he he's a man who like Byron has is suspected of incest certainly of you know carrying away a young girl meeting shell is tremendously liberating and it is the great event of her early life obviously but it crystallizes her separation from her family and for her separation from her father in particular the reason that Mary shell arrives in Geneva in 1816 is to do with her complicated family she is brought up with a alongside a stepsister called CLA Claremont when Mary and Shel elope in 1814 to France they take CLA with them it becomes increasingly
tense with the three of them and CLA decides at some point in the early spring of 1816 that she is bored of being the third wheel in shell and Mar's relationship and that she's going to acquire a poet of her own and so she throws herself at Byron who is the most famous poet of the day CLA therefore decides that she and Shel and Mary should follow Byron to Europe and that they should follow to [Music] Geneva the book Frankenstein is written in an extraordinary period historically but also geographically there's a great appeal of Europe
but specifically Switzerland as this new Republic the land of William tale and of Russo too so they go to Geneva and they set up home on the edge of the of Lake Geneva and the villa deti which is where Milton had stayed you know the Milton of course Paradise loss is a key influence on Frankenstein um but they set up this kind of commune it's where the famous events of the summer take place it's where because Byron is there as a magnet other people congregate and they are like rock stars I mean Byron is a
man who walks around with a condom in his pocket you know there there are people hiring L telescopes on the other side of the lake so people can spy on the on the wickedness that's going on there Byron seems to suggest that everyone should write a ghost story this suggestion that they should to ghost story causes something of panic in her because everyone else gets going and she can't think of one and every morning she's asked to think of one and she has to say that she can't until one night she has what she describes
as a waking dream in which she sees a vision of her novel comes to her in a kind of hallucinatory state and then she was able to emerge downstairs the next morning and announce that she had thought of a story you have the sense reading accounts it been extremely intense thunder storms Echo around the lake in Europe in fact experiences one of its worst Summers ever crops fell all over Europe there's huge unrest as a result and what that means for Mary is that she is sitting watching Lake Geneva as lightning and thunder Echoes around
the mountains and around the lake so it's tremendously dramatic the sheer sort of frenzied almost druglike um state that they work themselves up into I mean Frankenstein is really born out of hyper tense State later when they leave Geneva and she they return to B to live for the winter and Mary writes starts to write the novel and Earnest terrible events happen Mary by this point has given birth to a child she has also lost a child she has lost her mother she has come to terms with being the daughter of a woman who is
a social outcast she has become so caught up in what she's writing I mean she really does enter a different Zone in this book all these things are caught up in this in this one tragic pathetic innocent ugly beautiful creature it is suggesting that creation need not be divinely inspired so you can't write something much more shocking than that in 1818 it's completely heretical I mean you might as well have gone up to the Archbishop of Canterbury and slapped him in the face um which is what this book does really in a way the novel
was originally published anonymously in 1818 it's not particularly unusual at that stage for novels to appear anonymously people often talk about the fact that she's very young when she writes at 18 19 I think that's one of the reasons it has the quality it has because it is very much a novel written by someone who is still in the process of working out what they think about the world news of its authorship does gradually leak out and it is reissued in 1831 so several years years after the first publication and after Shel has died and
this preface written for the 1831 Edition situate the work as the novel of someone who is much younger of of someone whose life has passed because by this point it's a crucially important for Mary to rehabilitate her reputation so that she can earn a living for herself and for her child that's a double-edged sword because on the one hand it means that she has a reputation and she's able to build a literary career for herself on the other you can never quite Escape having been the author of Frankenstein
