instance, had originally been known
as Villa Belle Rive, and Mary called the
Frankenstein estate on Lake Geneva
“Belrive.” In the book, the monster
educates himself by reading books that
had deeply influenced Mary herself—
including Goethe’s Sorrows of Young
Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, which provides
the book’s epigraph: “Did I request
thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould
me man? Did I solicit thee / From dark-
ness to promote me?”
Not surprisingly, she was also
inspired by Fantasmagoriana, the
book that had sparked Byron’s ghost
story competition. “The History of the
Inconstant Lover,” in which a man finds
himself embracing a corpse, may have
inspired Dr. Frankenstein’s grim reverie
about his murdered fiancée: “I thought
I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health,
walking in the streets of lngolstadt.
Delighted and surprised, I embraced
her; but as I imprinted the first kiss
on her lips, they became livid with the
hue of death; her features appeared to
change, and I thought that I held the
corpse of my dead mother in my arms;
a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw
the grave-worms crawling in the folds
of the flannel.”
Travel inspired Mary too. After
the weather finally improved at Lake
Geneva, the friends climbed the Alps,
where the forbidding landscapes
influenced Mary’s descriptions of
the novel’s Arctic scenes. “This is the
most desolate place in the world—iced
mountains surround it—no sign of
vegetation appears except on the place
CONTINUED ON PAGE 28
“She now bore the
sense of a double
murder. Not only
had she killed her
mother but she had
allowed her own
baby girl to die.”IN THIS 1867 ILLUSTRATION,
Dr. Andrew Ure uses electricity
to make the corpse of Matthew
Clydesdale, an executed
murderer, twitch and jerk. As
religion was challenged by a
growing faith in science, some
wondered if electricity could be
the source of life—a question
that drove the pseudoscience
of galvanism.24 LIFE FRANKENSTEIN
ALBUM/QUINTLOX/ART^RESOURCE,^ NY^