Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” returns to Cologny 200 years after its birth
The weather on Lake Geneva in June 1816 was especially bad — we know what that’s like lately but rather than climate change being the culprit as it is today, a volcanic eruption in faraway Indonesia was to blame for the storms over Europe that Summer. (Well, in fact, the eruption did evoke catastrophic climate change for years after its eruption leading to widespread crop failure and mass hunger on the continent.) Torrential rain was proving tedious for five young visitors to the area — all exiles from scandal and debt in London — and one of them, their host one sodden evening at his rented digs, the Villa Diodati in Cologny, put down a challenge as a means of distraction: “We will each write a ghost story,” he said. Frankenstein: the first science fiction novel The works resulting from that competition would achieve literary acclaim and over time, none more so than that of 19-year-old Mary Godwin, the lover and soon-to-be wife of the renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who was there along with their host, the infamous Lord Byron and the latter’s personal physician John William Polidori. It took some time for Mary …
