Episode Details

The mind behind one of history's most terrifying horror and science fiction masterpieces did not belong to a grizzled professor of forbidden sciences but to an eighteen-year-old girl processing immense grief. This deep dive traces the life of Mary Shelley, daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin, whose mother died eleven days after her birth and whose father's remarriage left her feeling emotionally discarded in a household full of the era's greatest thinkers. At sixteen she eloped with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire, was disowned, and wandered a Europe ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars.

We explore the journey down the Rhine past the real Frankenstein Castle and the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, the premature baby who lived only two weeks, and the year without a summer of 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Trapped indoors at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and John Polidori, Mary faced a ghost story challenge, days of writer's block, late-night talks about Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani's electrical experiments, and a waking dream that astronomers date to the early hours of June 16, 1816. We follow the writing in Bath amid two suicides, the anonymous 1818 publication of 500 copies, the stage adaptations that made it famous, and the more conservative 1831 revision.

• How abandonment by her father and the loss of her infant daughter shaped the creature's anguish
• The dark history of Frankenstein Castle and Dippel's oil
• Why a volcanic eruption in Indonesia trapped the Shelleys and Byron indoors in Switzerland
• Galvanism and vitalism: why 1810s scientists believed electricity could reanimate the dead
• How the 1831 edition sanded down the radical edges of the original novel