Frankenstein inspired by suicide of Mary Shelley’s half-sister, book reveals

Frankenstein’s monster, as horror fans know, did not really spark into life with a bolt of lightning, but was born inside the mind of Mary Shelley during a dreary holiday on a ­mountainside above Geneva. The inspiration came as volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked out the sun that summer of 1816 and she and her friends, including the ­infamous, “bad boy” poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, ­competed to tell scary stories.

But a new collection of the young author’s personal diary entries, out in March, provides strong evidence that, although the stay in the Alps set the grim mood of her novel, her imagination was ignited by something ­personal and much closer to home.

Shelley’s journals, letters and short stories from this period, published together for the first time, reveal that the dark shadow that hangs over the plot of Frankenstein is the mysterious suicide of her elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay. The poet and Shelley scholar Fiona Sampson, who wrote the introduction to the new collection from Manderley Press, is convinced a secret shame lurks behind this sad death and that it coloured the novel. She also believes she has spotted the fake alibi that gives the game away.

The author, still known then as Mary Godwin, had returned from Switzerland later that year and taken lodgings in Bath with her notorious married lover, Shelley, and their small child. “Hoping for a discreet place to live, they were actually at the heart of what we know as Jane Austen’s Bath, a place of genteel gossip,” Sampson told the Observer.

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