“Oh! If I could only contrive (a story) which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened!”

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus as the result of a dare from a friend.  The friend was poet, Lord Byron and he challenged her to write a ghost story as part of a game while passing the time on a rainy day.  

“I busied myself to think of a story – a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader   dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart”

Mary Shelley and Byron would often play games involving creative story-telling along with Shelley’s husband, poet Percy Bysse Shelley.  On that rainy day Mary Shelley accepted the…