I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. [Frankenstein] is the only one which has been completed. MARY SHELLEY: _First Preface_ to ‘Frankenstein.’ Boston: Sever, Francis & Co., 1869. * * * * * [Sidenote: Its conception.] I busied myself _to think of a story_--a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.... I thought and pondered--vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull nothing replies to our anxious invocations. _Have you thought of a story?_ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others, the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.... Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I had placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw--with shut eyes, but acute mental vision--I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.... I opened my eyes in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark _parquet_, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and the high white Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story--my tiresome, unlucky ghost story. Swift as light, and as cheering, was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it!” ... On the morrow I announced that I had _thought of a story_. I began that day with the words, “_It was on a dreary night in November_,” making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream. MARY SHELLEY: _Second Preface_ to ‘Frankenstein.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Mary in 1822.]