Copies of Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein text to be published

Shelley spent nine months by Lake Geneva writing the story of the bringing to life of a monster

Percy Shelley’s correction of Mary Shelley’s misspelling of “igmmatic” in the notebooks in which she scrawled the story of Frankenstein – “enigmatic o you pretty Pecksie!” he wrote – will be seen in all its glory in a new facsimile of Shelley’s handwritten text to be published in March.

Shelley wrote the draft of Frankenstein in two large notebooks over nine months, after famously being challenged by Lord Byron, along with her then lover Percy Shelley, stepsister Claire Clairmont and Byron’s personal physician John Polidori, to “each write a ghost story” in the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva. She was 18 at the time, and continued her work on the story after returning to the UK, finishing in the spring of 1817.

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