In the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley was about to do something that would change literature forever—and it all started with a little competition. Mary, just 18 years old at the time, had already lived through enough drama for ten lifetimes. She’d eloped with the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, suffered the death of her first child, and was now stuck at Lord Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva, thanks to a volcanic eruption that had wiped out summer in Europe.
As if being holed up in the Swiss Alps with a group of overly intellectual writers wasn’t bad enough, Mary and her companions were all in for a challenge. Lord Byron, being the quintessential dramatist, proposed a bet: who could write the scariest ghost story? A little friendly competition, right? Only this wasn’t any ordinary competition. This was a battle of literary egos between Lord Byron, the tempestuous poet; Percy Shelley, her husband, the dreamy, overly philosophical poet; and Mary Shelley, the young woman who just wanted to finish a sentence without being interrupted by an argument about Wordsworth.
Percy, with his flowery ideas about nature, started scribbling down some ideas about a supernatural story. Byron, naturally, was more concerned with looking like the tragic, tortured genius. But Mary? Well, she wasn’t there to write about ghosts—she wanted to write about something far more horrifying: the monstrosity of humanity itself.
By the flickering candlelight, as the group whiled away the hours, Mary’s mind wandered, and then, it clicked. Her monster wouldn’t be some spooky, ethereal spirit. Her creature would be born of science. It would be stitched together from dead bodies, electrified, and brought to life with the crude tools of a madman. That’s when she knew—this would be the ghost story to end all ghost stories.
As Byron and Percy prattled on, Mary plunged into the darkness of her imagination. By the time the competition ended, Percy had written a few pages of vague romantic nonsense, Byron had produced a rather lackluster poem, and Mary had 'Frankenstein'. Yep, that’s right, the novel we now hail as one of the greatest works of Gothic horror came from an 18-year-old, fresh off a bet and a week of boredom.
The kicker? She didn’t even win the competition. Byron declared Mary’s work “too philosophical” and gave the “victory” to Percy. But it didn’t matter. Mary had created 'Frankenstein'—one of the most iconic monsters in literary history—and she knew she had won.
And so, Mary Shelley, at the ripe old age of 18, walked out of that summer with a published masterpiece and a pretty great story to tell.