Mary Godwin Learns to Read by Tracing the Letters on a Morgue

June 10, 1816. A storm settles over Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Stuck inside a romantic villa, five writers grow restless. Then one of them issues a challenge: Who among us can write the most terrifying ghost story? The group includes two of the most accomplished poets of the day – Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But it’s Percy's lover, Mary, who creates an enduring masterpiece: the novel Frankenstein. How did Mary Shelley draw from her life to write this harrowing story? And why have we been talking about it for more than two hundred years?

Special thanks to our guest, Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley.

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