Being asked each day by Shelley whether
she had found a story, she answered "No," till one evening after
listening to a conversation between Byron and Shelley on the principle
of life--whether it would be discovered, and the power of
communicating life be acquired--"perhaps a corpse might be reanimated;
galvanism had given tokens of such things"--she lay awake, and with
the sound of the lake and the sight of the moonlight gleaming through
chinks in the shutters, were blended the idea and the figure of a
student engaged in the ghastly work of creating a man, until such a
horror came to light that he shrank in fear from his own performance.
Such was the original idea for this imaginative work of a girl of
nineteen, which has held its place among conspicuous works of fiction
to the present day. _Frankenstein_ was the outcome of the project
before mentioned of writing tales of horror. One night, when pouring
rain detained Shelley's party at the Villa Diodati over a blazing
fire, they told strange stories, till Byron, leading to poetic ideas,
recited the witch's scene from "Christabel," which so excited
Shelley's imagination that he shrieked, and ran from the room; and
Polidori writes that he brought him to by throwing water in his face.
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