The presumed scenario around the writing of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818 is well known. In the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, the twenty-year-old Mary, her young husband Percy Shelley, George Gordon Byron and Byron's personal physician John Polidori challenged each other, it is said, to write ghost stories: Polidori's tale, ‘The Vampyre’, became the first vampire story in English, while Mary wrote Frankenstein, which has since become one of the best-known novels in Britain, Europe and possibly the world.

The truth is, as usual, more complex. Mary Shelley was engaged in writing Frankenstein from 1816 onwards, a period when she was much disturbed by various deaths, and the idea for the book apparently sprang from a nightmare she records from 16 June of that year, when she ‘saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion’. This, clearly, is the central image of the book, and the one which remains in the common cultural memory: the initial stirring of the monster, the suggestion that it may be possible to create life from dead matter.