Abstract
Geneva, 1816. Nineteen year old Mary Shelley stays at Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati with John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley and of course their host, Lord Byron himself. A wildly decadent meeting of minds, both turbulent and visionary in equal measure, results in a seemingly harmless competition — to write a horror story. Mary’s story began as a dream, a manifestation of the desires and anxieties of a brilliantly gifted 19 year old. This dream, charged with the ideas and sentiments of her friends, formed the basis for Shelley’s ‘entry’ into Byron’s competition. The result was Frankenstein, a story widely appreciated not only for its Gothic sentiment and its Romantic ideology, but also for the significance that it holds as the earliest example of a science fiction narrative.
It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet…1
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Notes
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© 2015 Sian MacArthur
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MacArthur, S. (2015). One Dreary Night: Early Science Fiction and the Gothic. In: Gothic Science Fiction. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389275_1
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