Historical story
The waking dream at Diodati
Dream · June 1816, told 1831 · Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva
June 1816
She tells it fifteen years later. Keep the delay.
Rain on the lake. Byron, Polidori, the Shelleys. They set themselves to ghost stories. Mary Shelley, in 1831, says she woke to a vision she could not dismiss, and that Frankenstein began there. The 1818 novel did not yet carry that preface.
Sourced
The 1831 introduction is first-person and late. Use it as her claim, not as a stenograph of 1816.
Concordance
- The thing
- A young woman, a rainy house, a ghost-story wager, a waking image of a creature and its maker.
- Seen
- Shelley describes a waking dream: the pale student, the assembled thing, the engine of life.
- Sourced
- Mary Shelley, introduction to the 1831 Frankenstein.
- Miss
- 1818 had no such introduction. The 1831 scene is memory.
- One question remains
- What is owed to 1816, and what to 1831?
