The Summer of 1816 at Villa Diodoti

Mary Shelley spent the greater part of the summer of 1816, when she was nineteen, at the Chapuis in Geneva, Switzerland. The entourage included her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron’s physician. Lord Byron rented the Villa Diodoti on the shores of Lake Geneva, which John Milton, the author of Paradise … Read more

Frankenstein Etymology

Frankenstein_Castle.jpg

Frankenstein means “the stone of the Franks”. Beginning around 500 A.D, the Franks took control of Gaule which was part of the Roman empire at that time. One of their their conquest was a Roman quarry in the vicinity of Darmstadt, Germany. A Knight called Arbogast Von Frankenstein is remembered as the earliest person known … Read more

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein was born August 30, 1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft, novelist and author of the founding document of feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, novelist and liberal political philosopher whose friends included many of England’s leading writers and thinkers. A Vindication of the Rights of Women … Read more