Frankenstein or "The Modern Prometheus" is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823.
Shelley had traveled the region in which the story takes place, & the topics of galvanism & other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband, Percy. The actual storyline was taken from a dream. Mary Shelley was talking with him & two other writer-colleagues, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, & they decided they would have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what she had made.
