ABSTRACT
No written work of the Romantic school of literature has been of greater interest to twentieth-century scholarship. Almost as much literary fascination has been aroused by its genesis as by the novel. This was at a house party in the holiday home of Lord Byron on Lake Geneva in June 1816: present at the Villa Diodati with Lord Byron were the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin, as she was then, plus her stepsister Claire Clairmont and Dr. Polidori, a young doctor. Mary Shelley's own account is in the preface she wrote fifteen years later for the 1831 third edition of her novel, Frankenstein. The novel has a complex form. There are three narrators: Victor Frankenstein the scientist; his creation the Monster; and Robert Walton who relays all their stories to his sister by letter.
