The year is 1816 when Mary Shelly, only eighteen years of age, creates the iconic story of Frankenstein’s monster. It is the same summer that Mary and her lover Percy Shelley visit Lord Byron and John Polidori at Lake Geneva. The friends spend long evenings by the fire, drinking laudanum-infused wine while reading one another ghost stories. One night Lord Byron suggests that they each write a ghost story of their own and this triggers a memory in Mary, taking her back four years earlier to Scotland, where she spent the summer and met Isabella Baxter. As Mary falls in love with Isabella, they are plunged into an enigmatic adventure in which imagination and reality prove to be equally strong components. It is from this memory that her story about Frankenstein’s monster arises.
Anne Eekhout brings the young mother, feminist avant la lettre and writer Mary Shelley to life in a highly original novel that is crafted from real historic events and imbued with great imagination.