Mary Shelley wrote an introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, telling the story about how she came to write the novel during that famous summer in 1816 while staying with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary's sister Claire, and Lord Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, in the Villa Diodati in Italy.
The story she tells is that, because of rainy weather, the group was stuck indoors, so Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story or horror story to pass the time. Mary couldn't think of anything for a few days, but then one night she stayed up listening to Shelley and Byron talk about the possibility of using electricity to re-animate a corpse (scientists of that era were beginning to discover that there was some kind of link between electrcity and the workings of the human or animal body).
Then, that night, Mary had a nightmare about exactly that, and she woke up terrified, and thus was conceived the idea for her novel.
This account written by Mary Shelley, forms the perfect outer-narrative for the novel, and because Frankenstein is structured as a set of nested narratives, with the introduction, the novel becomes a narrative (of the monster) within a narrative (of Victor Frankenstein) within a narrative (of Walton the sea captain and explorer) within a narrative (of Mary Shelley herself).
One of the interesting things about Mary's account is that it seems to contain a number of factual inaccuracies, or, in other words, in some ways it's a work of fiction. Like, for example, she writes that no one else came up with any decent ideas for a story and she specifically mentions Polidori's idea about a skull-headed lady, but there's no evidence that Polidori worked on a story with that idea. What he did do was work on a story about a vampire (The Vampyre) which he later published and it did quite well. Some people even regard it as representing the birth of the whole vampire genre - the first modern vampire story that rendered the folk tale of the vampire in literary form. Christopher Frayling writes that The Vampyre 'is probably the most influential horror story of all time' (Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula p107).
There's another conflict between Polidori's and Mary's account of events. She writes that, over a number of days, every morning the rest of the group would ask her if she had come up with an idea and she would always say she hadn't, until the morning after her nightmare. Polidori though, records in his diary, in the days after Byron initiated the challenge, that everyone else had begun their stories except himself.
But I don't think the inaccuracies in Mary's story were deliberate deceptions. Maybe she was 'fictionalising' to some extent, but I think it's more the case that real life is always more complicated than any story and lends itself to different tellings. Like, for example, I did some research and found out that Polidori actually worked on three different stories, and his vampire story was probably mostly written at a later date. Maybe Mary's account of his story came from something he said as a joke or in passing. There are all kinds of possibilities.
Even the fact that Polidori wrote and published the story about the vampire is more complex than it appears. It was actually published without his knowledge and attributed to Lord Byron, and even after both Byron and Polidori objected, Byron was still listed as the author when it was published as a book (it was first published in a periodical). Eventually, in later reprints, Polidori was listed as the author. But, to complicate things further, Polidori's story incorporated or was inspired by, a fragment that Byron wrote during the days at the Villa Diodati. Polidori also developed another of the three stories he worked on into a novella, which he published.
One thing we know for sure is true in Mary's account is what she writes about the weather. It was more than a few days of inclement weather....it was seemingly relentless. That year has become known as 'the year without a summer'. The eruption of a couple of major volcanoes (especially one in Indonesia) resulted in abnormally low temperatures, heavy rain, and severe food shortages because of the effects on agriculture, throughout the world.
That crisis probably shaped Frankenstein in a variety of ways. The novel is full of storms and other dramatic natural phenomena. I think Frankenstein also reflects Mary Shelley's personal experience of, not just the global weather crisis, but her own crises. Each of us is unique and we face our own personal crises, but there's also a universal aspect to the challenges we face. That's why a writer can embody these issues in their work, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, and they resonate with the reader.
In her account of how she came to write Frankenstein, one of the most interesting ideas is the way that writing the story was not so much an expression of Mary's fears as a way for her to allay them. That's one of the things we do when we write....it's a way of exercising agency.
Mary's initial response to her terrifying nightmare was not to think that that was really scary so it would make a good subject for my horror story.....no, she was trying to think of a way to distract herself and occupy her mind so that she could forget the image she had seen with her mind's eye. So, she decided to work on her story, and then it occurred to her that what had scared her would probably scare other people - so, she now had the idea for her story.
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